Enticing Gamers

Here are the principal potential advantages to the Phantom, from a gamer's perspective:

  • Better selection: A major game retailer, such as Electronics Boutique, is only going to carry a couple hundred games for a particular console or for Windows PC. The store just doesn't have room to put any more on the shelves. And because it's expensive to print discs, package discs and ship discs to physical stores, only relatively large game companies can afford to get a lot of games to stores anyway.

    There are a lot of game developers out there who could produce thousands of games for a particular console or a PC, if they could get past the distribution hurdle. When you take the physical disc out of the picture (because the gamer downloads the game), there is no competition for shelf space, so it's easy to expand selection. PC owners enjoy these same advantages -- they can download games they might not find anywhere else.


Photo courtesy Infinium Labs
The Phantom keyboard and mouse

  • Lower price: Again, because you're taking manufacturing and distribution costs out of the picture, you cut down significantly on the game distributor's expenses. This means, potentially, Phantom games could cost less than comparable X-Box, GameCube or PlayStation 2 games.

    According to Infinium Labs, you would have thousands of games to choose from, ranging in price from $2.99 to $50.

  • Preview capability: Using the VPGN set-up, Infinium labs could let gamers try out games on a trial basis or rent games, before the gamer would have to buy. This isn't anything new either -- you can download trial PC games from the Internet, and you can rent console games at a video store. The main perk is convenience: Phantom would let you do it without searching the Internet or going to the store.