Why Android for new (micro) consoles?

Posted by Klaim on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Klaim
Published on 2013-06-29T15:24:37Z Indexed on 2013/06/29 16:30 UTC
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android

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There are a lot of new (micro) consoles with Android inside coming soon or already there (OUYA for example).

My question is: why use Android and not another OS as base for these consoles?

I assume that there are pragmatic answers to this but I can't see any clear killer feature. For example, one can assume that any stable Linux distribution would work (like Valve seem to think). Android is primarily targetted at mobile platforms which mean it is built around the idea of being interrupted which goes against a lot of what console devs needs in new hardware - but is not killing Android as a platform for gamedev either as it's just a constraint.

Why not another OS? What's the Android killer features that make micro-console builder using it instead of Linux or anything else?

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