the cost of running the whole business, developing Runescape games

All will try to make distribution a cinch. Whether we're talking Valve through Steam or Ouya through some form of RS Gold store, all are attempting to make it as seamless as possible both for developer and user. So you could easily see a day when a fourteen year old kid has his Runescape gamestick hooked up to his cheap laptop and is using it as a dev unit with Android and Unity to make and sell Runescape games. The bedroom coder reborn. A second answer is that the technology barriers are dropping. While a high end PC or console is still where cutting edge graphics are to be found, smarter indies have been chasing them for a while. Titles like The Walking Dead, Dear Esther, Bastion, Hotline Miami or Journey all show distinctive style and in some cases great polish, and this sense of look is increasingly more important than power. While it's unlikely that Runescape would ever appear on a microconsole, the larger question is whether that really matters. The third is cost, both on hardware and distribution. When the Ouya was first announced there was a lot of debate about the cost per unit of the machine and how well it could fulfil its promise to be cheap. It seems that others have concluded that producing a low to medium power microconsole is doable though, which is why there is more than one such project in the works. We're living in an age where the perceptible differences of performance hardware have largely given way to lower costs and this is why Raspberry Pis can exist, so it's not a great stretch to suggest that that trend can continue. Questions over retail partnerships for microconsoles also hang in the air, and whether they can achieve mass traction quickly. My feeling is that this is the wrong question though. Mass traction is a factor that consoles need because of the cost of running the whole business, developing Runescape games, producing disks and research on new hardware. Microconsoles are more likely to follow similar paths to microcomputers or mini hardware like the Roku, appealing to passionate enthusiasts first and then trying to cross the chasm later. Microconsoles are also much more likely to have regular hardware updates possibly annually like mobile phones rather than the 5 7 year cycles of consoles. This gives them much greater ability to iterate and innovate, and then sell new machine through Amazon etc. Much as Kindle, Samsung and Apple have done, microconsoles could potentially be sold and resold to the same customers every year or two, and at prices low enough to avoid making those purchases seem odious. A fourth answer is focus. While it seems to make sense to Microsoft and Sony, and to a lesser extent Nintendo, to transform their Buy Runescape Gold game machines into multimedia powerhouses, their reasoning is based on magical thinking. They continue to believe that there's a greater market out there for an entertainment box yet sales of both Xbox 360 and PS3 would indicate that there isn't. And while Microsoft is fond of touting a statistic that the Xbox 360 is used more for video than Runescape games, I personally think that that number is soft much as the PS2 being used to play DVDs was.