GameStick Ships Dev Units, Kickstarter Units Delayed Until Late June

As we posted on Friday, the initial OUYA console reviews have begun to roll-out, and at this point, it’s clear that there’s some work to be done before the final retail launch occurs this June. As we can nows see, delivering an affordable console at around the ~$100 range is hard, so with the initial reports of OUYA in, we turn our heads to GameStick – to our knowledge, its biggest competitor.

Unlike OUYA, which is a set-top box, GameStick is a gamepad + HDMI dongle solution that allows you to take it virtually anywhere. Both consoles have similar goals, though, and both are based on Android. So can GameStick impress us more than OUYA has up to this point? It’s hard to say, because with a recent update, we learn that the first non-dev GameSticks will not reach its first customers (Kickstarter backers) until late June.

As mentioned in the project update: “Initially we had hoped to deliver GameStick to you at the end of April. We now expect to complete mechanical tooling about 4 weeks later at the end of May. Then the units are assembled, tested and assuming there are no issues, packed prior to shipping to each territory. We expect to ship around the 10th June. The volumes are now too large for us to be able to afford to air-freight them, which was our plan, so now we are going to have to use sea freight to deliver them. That’s going to take around 2 weeks. Then we have fulfillment in territory – which we estimate will take between 1 and 5 days depending on where you are located. This means we think the likely date of arrival of your hand crafted GameStick will be at the last week of June.”

While that’s a bit disappointing, a couple of good points are made. On the upside, the team has secured 27 retailers around the world that will sell the console, with GameStop in the US and Game in the UK being the lead retail partners. With those companies jumping on board, the future looks quite good for GameStick. Based on what we’ve seen from OUYA, though, expectations are high, so the folks at these projects have quite the workloads ahead of them.