What is Project Shield, And Why Does It Exist?

If you were paying attention late last night you would have caught the first bit of big news to hit the netwaves out of CES 2013. Put simply, Nvidia -out of nowhere- has entered the portable gaming market with something they are calling Project Shield. The unit, unveiled by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, is an Android gaming device with the standard fair. A modern controller design with a clamshell closing high-resolution touchscreen; but the big selling point is supposed to be the processor. Called the Tegra 4 chip, Nvidia is claiming it to be the “worlds fastest mobile processor” with multiple times the processing power of the Microsoft Surface and a battery life of 5-10 hours.

It should be noted that Project Shield can also interact directly with the PC, having the ability to stream games wirelessly from PC and access game services such as steam. This is all well and good, of course, but even the fastest most beautiful car in the world will sit somewhere collecting dust if no one is around to drive it.

Currently, some people are ooohing and aaahing at the prospect of Nvidia making this 'bold move' but I'm not feeling the love here. Is there really a market for taking your Andriod iOS games on the go without your phone? Is there really a market for playing PC produced games on a screen the size of a lipstick mirror? Where is the third party support for something like this? And fundamentally, I'm not convinced that people want to take a sit-down, 'big-game' experience “On The Go!”. I don't believe that games like Borderlands 2 or Skyrim are worthwhile commuter -or bathroom- experiences that will force a person to chuck out the dollars for the fastest mobile processor ever offered. Especially when the market has already become completely and utterly supersaturated by the likes of Nintendo and Sony combined.

Both the 3DS and Sony's Vita are currently struggling, and it seems that Sony at least might be banking on complete synthesis with the Vita and its upcoming PlayStation 4 to breath some life into that slovenly body. The Vita does offer those big-game experiences Project Shield is promising to deliver...and people aren't biting.

The explosion of the Android Console has been sudden, and surely a result of the currently waning console generation intermingled with an overly optimistic iOS market. But are people so attached to Angry Birds and even games like Infinity Blade to move those experiences to their television? Not that we even know what the price point of Project Shield will even be as of yet.

I don't think so.

Especially when in just under a year all we're going to be talking about is the next generation of consoles, and at some point in the middle of the night we'll awaken from a deep sleep, suddenly remembering that at one time Project Shield, and for that matter the Panisonic Jungle, was a thing.