When BlueStacks earlier this month unveiled its Android-powered gaming console that is set to compete against OUYA and others, it didn’t yet reveal how much its ‘GamePop’ would cost, stopping short of saying it would be “approximately $100”.
Today, the company is announcing that the price for the console will be $129, and that it is extending its offer of giving the console away free of charge to the end of June “due to the high demand of pre-orders”.
GamePop combines a game console and controller with an all-you-can-eat annual subscription service that costs $83.88 (or $6.99 per month) and essentially allows buyers to play mobile games on their TV.
BlueStacks today also announced the addition of games from three developers that it points out would normally cost over $50 on the Google Play store (they’re included for no extra charge within BlueStacks’ offering as outlined above, which is a rather compelling selling proposition).
BlueStacks is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcomm Ventures, Citrix Systems and Intel Capital. BlueStacks also raised funding from Austin-based AMD, makers of the new chips for the Xbox One and PS4 consoles and one of its strategic partners.
Alex Turetsky, CEO of education app developer Intellijoy, comments on BlueStacks’s GamePop offering thusly:
“Joining GamePop was a no brainer for us. We saw how our games look and feel on the actual device and confirmed that the controls and ease of use was well thought-through.”
Intellijoy is today announcing the addition of a number of paid titles (worth “nearly $30”) to GamePop at no extra cost. In addition, BlueStacks brought on board Korea’s largest game developer, publicly-traded COM2US, which will have its own ‘channel’ in the GamePop UI.
Up until now, BlueStacks was best known for its App Player software, which now caters to 10 million users who want to play their favourite mobile games on a Mac or PC desktop computer.
Like OUYA’s gaming box, its GamePop console runs on Android (Jelly Bean 4.2), and the technology that went into the hardware is completely separate from BlueStacks’ aforementioned App Player software.
Games are stored on the console itself.
Meanwhile, Kickstarter darling OUYA is gearing up to start selling its own Android-based video game console in retail stores at the end of next month, backed by a fresh $15 million in VC funding from Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA and others.
The OUYA console costs $99, but games need to be bought separately.
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