nVidia and Infinium to Partner at CES

JonLatane writes "It seems that nVidia is going to allow Infinium to demonstrate their Phantom "game service" at their CES booth. Since its inception, Infinium has proven to be rather belligerent about its product and will probably stay in court for a long time."

Ridiculously misleading topic--same as IL and MS

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no "partnership." Total anti-NVIDIA BS some sites are putting on this. The fact of the matter is that IL is a customer of NVIDIA, as the machine has an FX 5600 in it. It also runs WinXP Embedded, so it's being demo'd at the MS booth as well as they announced a while ago (PDF). [infiniumlabs.com]

Isn't a partnership at all...they're simply a

[Polarism]

client.

This is just a case of a vendor allowing a client to do some free advertisement for them, even if the thing is vaporhardware.

Can Someone Explain This To Me

[Class Act Dynamo]

Just like everyone else, I have read about this system and laughed at all the jokes we have had at its expense. I have to ask, though, what benefit does this company get out of constantly hyping this seemingly nonexistant product? Is it that they had some idea that they boasted about before realizing it's not quite so easy to just build a new gaming system, or is it that this is some bizarre, ass-backwards means of getting publicity for future products? I agree, though, with an above poster. The fun seems to be in watching this company constantly hype a phantom product (pun most definitely intended) and making jokes about it.

Ya right...

[Mr_Whoopass]

Far be it from me to call B.S. on something before having seen it, but lately hardware manufacturers seem to be relying more and more on "Press Releases" and benchamrks to garner attention, and thus investor money rather than truly innovating as was the norm only a few years back. Tom's hardware got sick of pandering to the hardware companies claims and said they were going to put an end to it.

http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20041011/index .html [tomshardware.com]

This reeks of a venture capital marketing strategy to me, but I suppose once the show is over and we see what they have to offer, I might change my mind. At the moment though this press release seems more hype than anything else judging from past experience with Infinium.

Re:Can Someone Explain This To Me

[barc0001]

Just like everyone else, I have read about this system and laughed at all the jokes we have had at its expense. I have to ask, though, what benefit does this company get out of constantly hyping this seemingly nonexistant product?

Well, you get more investment money from suckers by doing this sort of thing, as well as trying to move the stock price if you've pulled in enough suckers to go public.

Look at it this way: Imagine you're broke, and living in your parents' basement. Would you rather:
a) Get a job at McDonalds
b) Go to college for a few years, build up student loans, get a job, pay them off over several years, or
c) Get a bunch of your friends together, form a company, announce a "product" that sounds awe inspriring to people with money, and set you and your friends up with high salaries once the investment captial for "product development" comes in. Everyone socks the cash away while doing smoke and mirrors shows for a couple of years until the investors finally don't put any more money in, and the company tanks. But since you and your friends have each put away 6 figures doing this, you're set for a while.
Find another "idea", and "product", rinse, repeat. However, it's a good idea when forming new companies to let some of your friends rotate between the positions, so that you don't have the same guy as president, CFO, etc all the time. That way you don't get someone coming up at an investment do and saying "weren't you just the CEO of so and so that tanked also? Why are you now CEO of this?"

Re:Another gaming console

[dargon]

Before you comment, you should understand how the Phantom is intended to work. It won't have a cd-rom / dvd-rom drive, instead all games will be purchased via the as yet immaterial phantom gaming network, also known as the Black Knight network (or something like that). The games will then be streamed to your consoles internal hdd where the intent is that you can begin playing the game before it's fully downloaded. With no way to remove items from the HDD, eventually some of the games you 'bought' will have to be downloaded again as they will have been deleted and replaced by something else. Furthermore, should Infinium manage to actually bring a product to market and then fold, you have a console and games you've purchased but can't play since the network is required (no offline mode like steam has), not that steam is necessarily superior but atleast you can play games you've downloaded such as HL2 in offline mode.

Re:Another gaming console

[suyashs]

It plays PC games, so that is basically BS meant to make it seem like they have some support. Nobody is making "Phantom Exclusive" games yet...it plays PC games so thats that.

Why does MS/nVidia care?

[dcviper]

I think the real question is, why is Microsoft and nVidia giving his thing any free press? Or, why is MS and nV giving up booth space at CES? If and when this thing ever comes out, it has all the earmarks of being an XBOX competitor? Perhaps they are thinking buyout, but of what; Does infinium own any patents? And, are they concerned about the well known flap between Infinium and [H]ardOCP.

r/dcviper

I'm a little impressed...

[St. Arbirix]

From the Yahoo article:

The Phantom Game Service will be delivered over broadband to a Windows XP Embedded-based receiver that sits with other devices in the room where family members go for entertainment.

Nearly two dozen leading game publishers have committed to provide content for the Phantom Game Service, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos and Vivendi Universal.

Show attendees can also see Phantom in the Microsoft Corp. booth in the Central Hall, No. 7145.

Whatever they've got, they've managed to get whatever a "commitment" is worth out of some pretty solid game publishers as well as space in NVIDIA and Microsoft booths at the show. It also looks like they're letting game publishers cut a lot of middle-men out of the way (except for the publisher, of course (like Valve didn't do)) by putting games over broadband. They've got that going for them at least. Before Half-Life 2 went out over Steam this was never on such a scale before.

Plus they've already managed to sue a few people which shows they've got some dice. They'll get along really pretty with the likes of that crowd. Unfortunately though, I remember when it was first announced, and I remember Linux being mentioned. Now it'll sit in a MS booth which may be awesome for them but is a little tragic for everyone who hoped getting a Linux console out there would lead to better Linux game support.

Re:Infinium stock tumbles

[GrfxGuru]

Look at the 3 month graph of the stock here [yahoo.com]. Look at the volume starting on Dec 17. They went from trading less than 500,000 shares a day to approx 5,000,000 a day from the 17th to today.

When there is no external information that would cause the stock to move that much, it is very fishy (as others have said, possibly a pump & dump). These things set off alarms over at the SEC. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're in on it), they move verrrryyy sloooowwly.

It is quite possible Infinium had nothing to do with this.

Three splits and not even breaking $2.50

[KalvinB]

I wish my stock (AVN) would split that often for no good reason. AVN gets good news from successful drug trials and barely budges.

Infinium looks like it might be good for day trading if you have money to throw away. When the stock is trading under $1 and losing money it's a really bad sign. It's also "over the counter" which means it's not actually being traded on the major markets.

I would need really good positive information before putting anything on it. At this point it's pure gambling since the value of the stock is based purely on investors and not on any sort of product and consumer market value. There's no product for people to buy to raise the value of the stock. The only product is the stock itself.

Re:Ridiculously misleading topic--same as IL and M

[blueZhift]

Nvidia doesn't really have anything to lose from this anyway. Industry insiders already know that the Infinium box is not likely to see the light of day much less be successful. While the general public and the less informed are not even aware of the Phantom or all of the controversy surrounding it. So as long as the demos themselves don't suck, Nvidia and MS won't mind. I would assume that putting together a decent demo is much easier than launching a successful product!

You know, if the Infinium debacle plays true to form, someday any and all things Infinium might fetch a nice sum on eBay!

Re:Another gaming console

[sqlrob]

Watermark all installs and patches that are downloaded.

Doesn't prevent fair use, allows tracking of infringers.

It allows disconnected clients to work without ever having to connect to the Internet at large, and doesn't depend on having a Windows client to connect to the net.

Pics of Infinium Lab's front door

[MREBoy]

I happen to live in Sarasota FL, less than 2 miles from the building where Infinium Labs has its main office. A while back (around the time the whole H-OCP vs Infinium thing started) I went by the building with my camera and snapped some pics.

Details:

The office is located on the 3rd floor of the Center Pointe building, which is in central Sarasota, not far from downtown (located at the corner of US 301 and Main St.).

Trivia item: the law firm that Infinium Labs uses takes up the top 2 floors of this building. Kinda convenient eh ? (see inf4.jpg) Not shown: the big glow in the dark/changes color sign that is on the top west side of the building. Said sign cost US$ 300,000 according to rumor.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/mreboy/inf1.jpg

filenames are inf1.jpg through inf8.jpg, each about 300k / 1280x960.

MRE