“…Therein lies his difficulty in getting more funding.
Venture capitalists look at Indrema, and then they look at its
competitors. Then they decide they want nothing to with Mr.
Gildred’s dream. VCs know that developing and manufacturing game
consoles is a capital-intensive endeavor. Even Microsoft
acknowledged that launching the Xbox console, due out in October
2001, will sap the company.“
“Mr. Gildred has a tough time proving to investors that his
company can make money. A console’s innards are not cheap, and even
established manufacturers lose money on the console-sales end —
hoping to make it back by licensing their game-building tools to
game developers. The developers pay the console makers for the
tools and then sell their games to consumers. Indrema, with its
open-source strategy, strays wildly from that model.”
“Microsoft, meanwhile, has come up with its own
developer-friendly plan. It allows developers to use familiar
PC-development tools to make Xbox games. That gives developers a
head start on the Xbox, whereas they have to learn completely new
development tools to create games for Sony PlayStation 2.
Microsoft’s pitch has been so appealing that it has so far landed
more than 200 game developers, leaving very few to work for
Indrema.”