Well if I backed the $700 level and got a pre-release version of this thing, I'd have to sell a game at $5 to 140 people in order to make my money back on the h

Well if I backed the $700 level and got a pre-release version of this thing, I'd have to sell a game at $5 to 140 people in order to make my money back on the hardware. Considering there are already (as I am writing this) > 15k backers I think it's fairly safe to assume that with the promised promotion that I could at least make that money back. If I don't get paid for all the time and effort I put into making the game... oh well. I like making games so it's not time wasted even if I don't ultimately get paid for it. Sounds like a cool hobby project at least. And what if it does take off? For a growing population of gamers there is no need for highly optimized hardware designed for crunching polygons and shaders. Not everyone wants to play CoD: Modern Hate Machine 5 Extreme. It would seem that this project is hedging its bets that this population of gamers is large enough to support building a specialized hardware platform for these types of games that they like. Seems pretty reasonable to me. I think I side with @notch (https://twitter.com/notch/status/220971663003623427 https://twitter.com/notch/status/220971663003623427): it would be awesome if this console does well. I think having a low-barrier development platform with wide adoption and a captive audience would be great. As it stands I can't just make a game for XBLA -- I have to suffer in obscurity in the indie store or create a real corporation with funding and a history of decent games and pitch my idea. Neither option is very attractive. I can't even imagine what developing for the PS3 would be like (as I haven't done any, but I'd imagine it would not be very fun). So I hope this project does do well. I think it will open a lot of doors and create new markets. That isn't really a bad thing for anyone.