BlueStacks, a company specialising in Android virtualisation, is coming out with a new Android gaming console called GamePop soon, that’ll run Android and iOS games on your TV.
The technology behind GamePop’s ability to run iOS games is a software layer called “Looking Glass” that mimics iOS APIs. This enables developers to use their existing iOS app codebase, with a few changes, for a GamePop game. Users won’t be able to directly install the games they have in iTunes on GamePop, but would instead have to wait for the developer to make a custom GamePop build available.
Of course interaction mechanisms for TV-based gaming consoles and portable touchscreens are very different, so GamePop’s controller would have to be built keeping that in mind. The company is tight-lipped about the controller as well as GamePop’s hardware until they get close to launch. They did however reveal that apart from dedicated controls, users would also be able to use their iPhone and Android phones as controllers.
BlueStacks claims to have many popular iOS game developers on board already:
The company has already lined up some relatively large iOS and Android developers to support its console, including Subatomic studios (the maker of the iOS hit Fieldrunners), Glu, Halfbrick, Jawfish Games, and Gameloft. Altogether, the company is promising that a collection of 500 of the top mobile games across Android and iOS will be playable on its console.
The company is creating a Netflix like subscription model for games, where users would pay $6.99 a month for access to GamePop’s entire catalog of Android and iOS games. If a user subscribes to GamePop for an entire year at once before the end of June, the console, valued at $129, would be bundled for free.
BlueStacks says that the console will be out by winter, but pre-orders have already opened. It remains to be seen if the company brings its iOS-apps-on-Android technology to other Android devices, especially tablets, which still don’t have great apps.
Apple’s long been rumored to open up its own TV platform to third-party developers, but that move hasn’t happened yet.
Via: The Verge
Also see: Rolomotion Converts Your Apple TV into a Wii-Like Gaming Console
