GameStick

» see gamestick.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The microconsole wave of 2012 and 2013 was a Kickstarter phenomenon, which in practice meant it happened in countries where backing a hardware project was a normal thing to do. I was 29 and playing on a desktop PC in Turkey, and the idea of paying in advance for an unproven $79 console that would then clear Turkish customs as an imported electronic device was not a plan anybody around me was making. So the GameStick reached me as coverage rather than as an object.

What it was: a games console shaped like a flash drive, going straight into an HDMI port, shipping with a wireless controller that had a slot in it so you could store the console inside the pad. Amlogic chip, ARM Cortex A9, 1 GB of memory, 8 GB of storage, Android 4.1 underneath. The maker was PlayJam, a British company that had been doing games on television since 1999, starting with interactive channels on Sky Digital and CanalSat and later putting casual games onto smart TVs from Samsung and LG.

The pitch had one genuinely good idea in it. Every retail GameStick was also a development kit, with no licensing fee to publish, which for a 2013 console was close to heretical. The rest was harder. It was promised for June 2013, production changed, and units did not reach retailers until the first days of November. It launched into a market where the Ouya had already collected the attention and the disappointment, and where the phone in your pocket ran the same class of Android game without a second device.

On 9 January 2017 the storefront went inactive. The notice on the site framed it as shutting the service down after two years of operation, and by December that year the page was just the goodbye message behind an expired certificate.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the kickstarter year ~

PlayJam ran the campaign in January 2013 and had it funded inside the month, ending with more than 5,600 backers and about $650,000. Before the campaign even opened, the company was saying that a thousand developers had signed up, and interested designers could pledge $500 for a prototype unit early.

The GameStick also got a media-player angle that nobody remembers: it was the first third-party device licensed to ship an XBMC-derived media platform, which in 2013 was the feature that made a cheap Android box worth owning. That was the correct read of the market. The problem was that a hundred other companies made the same read with cheaper boxes and no controller.

~ the day the store went quiet ~

A microconsole dies differently from a real console. There is no last cartridge, no final firmware, just a storefront API that stops answering, and after that the hardware boots into a menu with nothing behind it. The GameStick's store carried 188 games in total, all of them delivered from PlayJam's servers, none of them on media you could keep.

The domain went too, and it landed somewhere I did not expect. gamestick.tv today redirects to northernleague.org, which is no longer a sports league either: it serves a Turkish-language page advertising live betting sites for 2026. A British console for casual gamers now points at gambling SEO spam written in my language. Expired domains get recycled by whoever has a use for the inbound links, and the used-domain trade in Turkey is loud enough to have picked this one up.

~ the archive ~

Nobody backed the platform up while it was dying. The community forum at gamestickers.net stayed online until 2023 and then went off too, taking the discussion with it. What exists now came later: starting in April 2024 a handful of people began reverse-engineering the store API from packet logs and old firmware, documenting it, and hunting the game packages down one at a time. As of the last count they have 163 of the 188 games, which is 86.7 percent of a console that sold poorly and closed nine years ago.

PlayJam, for its part, is still a live company on the UK register, filing accounts, formerly known as Static 2358 Limited. The console it crowdfunded has been dead since 2017 and the firm that built it has outlived it by a decade.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »