The Zeebo launches in Sao Paulo next month. It will be only slightly more graphically powerful than an iPhone, play games that are positively antique, and has the cheapest peripherals modern industry can produce. It also could become the biggest selling console the world has ever seen.   Details after the pular…

Brazil, as Wikipedia infallibly informs us, has the world’s tenth largest economy and is the ninth largest in purchasing power, coming close in behind France and the UK. It  has only 10% of the American average GDP, but despite this buys significantly more condoms. The message we get from this is twofold – one, Brazilian girls are muito quente, and that these people clearly have a lot of time on their hands that could be used playing computer games. However, caught by an insanely high tax on imported games that causes new titles to retail at upward of $200 USD, the modern Sao Paulo gamer faces a grim future of either resorting to ‘grey market’ pirate consoles or going back to having sex with his tanned, curvaceous Brazilian girlfriend. Please, give generously.

The Zeebo console by TechToy is meant to be the answer to Jose Gamer’s terrible dilemma as a market-tailored rival to the Big Three consoles that have dominion in the more affluent areas of the western world. Even without the tax vagaries in Brazil, the cost of even the humblest and whitest of the current generation consoles is prohibitive, especially factoring in the ongoing cost of the games.

Similar situations exist in those markets that are past the point of being ‘emerging’ but don’t yet have the clout to have a BestBuy or an HMV, let alone a High Street to put them on. Zeebo is targeting the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) that represent an absolutely honking great chunk of change if the price is right – which is to say: very low indeed. Further releases are planned in Mexico and across South America.

The Zeebo will get its launch in Sao Paulo next month, with a big roll out across the rest of Brazil over the following quarter. The chiefs behind the Zeebo – CEO John Rizzo, founder Reynaldo Norman, and Director Mike Yuen – have been doing the full court press with media coverage, this week giving an interview to Gamasutura about the capabilities and the potential of this console for the struggling masses.

One of the biggest selling points is the $199 asking price and the entirely digital distribution of its cheapie games via integrated 3G wireless, going for between $5 and $10 each. As you might expect from that price tag, the games range between the slightly aged to the antique with the confirmed launch titles to include Quake 2, Tekken 2, Resident Evil 4, Sonic Adventures, Need for Speed Carbon and the redoubtable Double Dragon.

The announced games might seem a little creaky to the rarefied palates of the Sarcastic Gamer regular, but there are reasons beyond the less than herculean processing power of the Zeebo. Reynaldo Norman claims that without the influence of the home console the centre of Brazilian gaming culture is still firmly rooted in the Arcade, where Daytona and Sega Rally still keep company with mid 90’s side-scrollers. The theory here is that what the BRIC market really wants is Street Fighter Alpha and Duke Nukem 3D, rather than the gaudy High-Def show ponies that the American and European market seems to like.

Popular reaction from bloggers and commentators from Brazil has, however, been less than rapturous. It’s worth keeping in mind that anyone sufficiently active on the internet to be commentating on a Gamasutura interview is likely already outside the Zeebo target market. The Zeebo has roughly the same power as your current higher end smartphone, with a resolution of a modest 640×480 and a gigabyte of onboard memory – which is ample since the games only weigh in at between 10 and 50 megabytes each.

Fans of obscure console lore will know that a cheap digital distribution console is not a novel idea, having been attempted with the ill-fated Phantom back in 2004, never making it past a lone working prototype. The developers of the Zeebo have approached the digital distribution from a different angle – implementing it not so much for the sake of the user’s convenience, but to thwart the thriving pirate market in the BRIC countries.

The downloaded games will all be specifically tied to a unique ID number in the console, which will likely bamboozle those enterprising piratical scallywags for all of an afternoon. Regardless, developers who have otherwise been discouraged from localising their product in these areas due to the high piracy rate might be tempted to swing more and more of their older or simpler products towards the Zeebo. If successful, it may well cause the germination of local developers and studios, which the Yankees and Euros can then poach and sweatshop to their hearts content.  The likes of Popcap are certainly all aboard, suddenly seeing a way to wirelessly sell copies of Peggle to the emergent middle-class of a nation of over 198 million people.

It is possible that if Zeebo gets positioned and localised just right it could effectively blow the rest of the consoles clean out of the water as far as sales are concerned. The best selling motorbike in the world isn’t a shiny Harley or a crotch-rocket Bimota – it’s a rattling cutdown Mechano looking thing called the Cub 90 made by Honda that boasts all of 5 horse power. The reason it is far and away the best selling bike ever is that the Far East is just littered with them – you can’t throw a poorly crafted casual racial stereotype without hitting a little fellow in pyjamas using one.

The Zeebo is trying to pull off the same trick with a console, but it remains to be seen if they’ve got the math right. TechToy already produces a series of handheld Mastersystem and Megadrive derivatives that do a steady business at $90 a pop, but $199 might still be optimistic for the target markets where piracy, grey-markets, and Brazilian women still provide attractive alternatives.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23156

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