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Polium One

There’s a lot of things to say about the Polium One. I don’t think any of them positive? I wanted to say a few things that don’t seem to be talked about elsewhere.

Manufacturing Numbers

Going off the Polium Pass section of their Medium post we can see for the first year they will only be producing 10,000 consoles for the people who partnered into this. So you’ll have a maximum of 10,000 other people to play with across the world?

Well, let’s divide that by three because it’s a worldwide release and time zones mean we need to factor in sleep and work plus commute and food so maybe 3k people online at a time? This means if they release 20 games for the Polium One, you’ll be looking at hopefully 120 other people online at any one time. Can you imagine how terrible a MMORPG would be? How few options you’d get in CoD lobbies or how restrictive the games would be to take advantage of a reasonable number of players per mode?

Of course, in 2025 they say production will ramp up and they hope to produce over one million units but for that first year, the true believers who really bought in are going to be wandering hallowed empty halls in their monkey pictures.

Specs

At the time of writing the current planned specs are:

  • 4K
  • Fingerprint scanner
  • Raytracing
  • 120 FPS

According to tweets online there used to be TouchID and 8k HDR in there as well:

Weird those two specs have disappeared! Especially the TouchID, strange that they’re walking back what would have been a pretty amazing feature - Apple’s proprietary hardware system for fingerprint identification that they have never ever ever licensed to anyone else. That was a pretty cool selling point, I wonder what happened?

Even with what stands, I’m not sure a box that appears to be about 20cm x 15cm x 5cm is going to push all those bits easily. And by “not sure” I mean I think I’ve got a better chance of having a white Christmas in Western Australia than anyone being able to create a device that can do that in time for a 2024 release.

Release Ready

They’ve currently just finished the console design section of Polium’s roadmap and are now on to hardware development. Then they’ll do software development. With a Q3 2024 release, I’m going to conservatively say there’s at least 6 months of manufacturing. quality assurance, and let’s not forget getting it certified by all those different countries before shipping. They expect to develop a novel console that is Completely Unhackable™ from scratch in 18 months.

Don’t forget, they don’t even have rough specs for it. They just say it will be a CPU/GPU from NVIDIA and an entirely custom build, which definitely isn’t the kind of thing that takes a long time for development.

Games

There are no current game partnerships announced. They’re in talks though!

Leaderboard

Back to their Medium post and they have a cool idea of a unified world leaderboard!

We want to build a console where winning and losing count so we came up with the idea to combine all compatible games into 1 leaderboard.

We already have enough difficulties picking a global “winner” in any one game. Like you might be #1 in Deathmatch but does that make you better or worse than the #1 in King Of The Hill mode? Now how do we rank you agaainst the Tetris world champion? And are they above or below the guy who beat Sim City 3000?

Thankfully Polium One has already worked out how to do do this in their leaderboard.

What else gets you on the leaderboard?

Players will move up the leaderboard by winning, earning trophies, and voting on proposals.

Aside from the concept that gaming as something to “win” is a flawed understanding of the totality of games and reverts to regressive view of what the medium is capable of, it’s good to know I can also vote on proposals to be the most 31337. I’m so glad the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers is coming to revolutionise the way we game.

Final Note

My “we did not copy the GameCube logo” tweet has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my tweet.