Whoa!

Some of you may have heard of the Phantom game console which is being developed by Infinium Labs. It has been the subject of much skepticism, and the company's president has come under scrutiny due to past ventures that have failed rather completely. The most complete investigation I've seen was performed by HardOCP. However, the company and it's proposed product have suddenly become a whole lot more credible. For one thing, they now have Kevin Bacchus as their President and COO. As they state on their Management Team page:

Kevin has nearly 20 years of experience in the game development industry as a developer, marketer, production executive and platform manufacturer. Kevin was a founding member of the Xbox project team at Microsoft Corporation, where he was instrumental in the development and funding of the Xbox videogame console. Kevin served as the company's first director of third party relations and lead efforts that brought the hottest games to Xbox from more than 200 of the world's leading developers and publishers. Kevin previously served as the group product manager for DirectX, where he was responsible for promoting Windows as an entertainment vehicle and ensuring that the DirectX suite of tools became the primary choice for games and multimedia developers.

They also have a new website with tons more information than before and the specs for the machine are a lot more detailed:

Infinium also revealed what's inside the receiver: an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ central processing unit, Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics processing unit, and an Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 platform processor. The receiver will be manufactured at Taiwan-based Biostar’s production facility in GuangDong Province, China. Other key specs of the Phantom receiver are DirectX 9 compliant graphics and audio, Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio, 256MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive.

Their business plan is akin to that of the cellular phone service industry:

To entice gamers to sign onto the Phantom service, Infinium is borrowing a page from the cell phone industry's book. The company plans on giving away a receiver, keyboard, and controller--to anyone willing to sign up for a two-year commitment to the service. The basic subscription package will cost $29.95 per month, with game prices to be set by publishers, but in line with retail, says Infinium. The service will offer game rentals as well, most often priced at $5 for three days. Gamers will also be able to purchase the hardware without any commitment for $199.

The game delivery model for the service sees games streamed on demand to a Phantom receiver over a broadband Internet connection. Subscribers will start off with a library of free games, to be supplemented with new titles each month. The service is to be available through a number of leading retail chains, though partners have yet to be announced.

So basically what we have is a dedicated gaming computer with a simplified set of peripherals and connections. I'm assuming it will connect to a TV, which will result in relatively low resolution (but very high framerates) compared to a monitor capable of 1024x768 resolution or better. The tech specs say it's, "HDTV and Dolby Digital 5.1 compatible," so it will also have component video and/or DVI output as well, and possibly standard VGA.

It will be interesting to see how well it does. Right now, games for consoles have to be tailored for the console environment. Ports of PC games sometimes succeed, sometimes not. With the Phantom, you're actually playing the game on a full-blown PC (albeit with certain restrictions) so it should take little effort to adapt the games to their subscription service.