Scientific Atlanta, a company which produces digital set-top boxes, is considering producing digital receivers with built-in high performance gaming capabilities. This is the latest company to reveal plans about entering the, now, lucrative video game market following announcements from Infinium Labs, Digital Interactive Systems Corporation's (DISC) DISCover console and Nokia's attempts with N-Gage. The promise of huge profits is proving too strong an incentive for companies to resist. After all, this is a USD 13 billion market and game consoles are the hottest segment of this market with some 75 million units sold since 2000.
James McDonald, Scientific-Atlanta chief executive, speaking at an investor conference in California, said that the company already has a team of developers creating games for its Explorer series of set-top boxes. Mr. McDonald however, refused to give any details or to mention when these models will become available. His exact statement was We have a partner we are working with who has 250 engineers in Europe writing software for the Explorer platform for games.
When asked whether the Explorer boxes will directly compete with current consoles such as Sony's PS2 and Microsoft's XBox, Scientific Atlanta's CEO does claim that I can give (gamers) the same performance you get out of those game boxes. This however does not necessarily mean that the device will compete with its rivals directly in retail since it is anticipated that Cable operators will provide the set-top boxes for their customers who may have to rent or purchase the content from them.
It is unclear what effect such an effort could have on the current big three of console gaming, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, but in theory it could damage their market shares as consumers will not have to pay for the actual console but only for the content. Moving this attractive idea to practice however, could prove a lot harder than it looks since producing enough good games in order to attract consumers will be a challenge. Especially when your competition is so well established and has such a strong influence on the people that make these games.