Keep your eye on these great indie games from PAX 2013

Whether or not you agree with the founders of the Penny Arcade Expo, there’s no arguing it’s a key tool for independent and smaller developers. PAX is the only mainstream, widely-known video game conference in the United States that’s also open to the public, and people come from all over to attend. Getting your game shown at PAX is a sure-fire ticket to a ton of exposure.

If you couldn’t make it to PAX this past weekend, don’t worry! I’ve got you covered. There were nearly 90 games in the Indie Megabooth this year, plus others scattered around the show floor. There’s no Dying Light or Titanfall on this list—everything on here comes from a small team, though a few (like Takedown) are working with well-established publishers.

With over a hundred games to cover, I’ve no doubt missed a few with this list. I don’t feel like I played enough Samurai Gunn to write something new about it, for example—though what I played was fantastic. I’ve also tried to stick to games you may not have heard of, in the hopes of sharing some indie gems. I’m looking forward to Hotline Miami 2 and Stanley Parable as much as anyone else, but hopefully you already know about those two games. Hopefully.

One look at Apotheon and you’ll immediately think, “Oh wow, that’s so obvious. I can’t believe nobody has done that before!” I’m of course referring to the art style, inspired by Ancient Greek pottery. It’s a brilliant choice, and helps raise this Metroidvania-type exploration game above the legions of others.

Apotheon looks gorgeous.

While I only got to play for a brief period of time, the full game takes place in a gigantic open-world version of Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek Gods. Presumably you’ll have to interact with them, though hopefully in a more nuanced way than the God of War games. Either way, Apotheon is easily the prettiest game I played at PAX.

Gravity Ghost is one of those games where the parts are so much less than the fantastic, joyous whole. The core mechanic is simple and familiar: you have to propel a ghostly figure through space collecting stars, but orbiting planets keep pulling you off course.

Gravity Ghost is another feel-good indie game that—surprise!—looks beautiful.

The game excels at presentation, however. It’s one of those rare games where even when you screw up, you don’t really care because it’s all so gorgeous. Flying through space leaves a bright, looping trail of light in your wake, and everything glows with color.

And since it’s unfair to treat your eyes while ignoring your ears, the game also features music from FTL composer Ben Prunty.

After almost six years there’s finally a sequel to Audiosurf, the fantastic music game where you fly your hovercraft on tracks procedurally generated from your own music. Explaining Audiosurf is kind of a lost cause, and at this point the game is so cheap you should probably just own a copy. Suffice it to say in the original game you chose a song from your music library and the game would then build a rollercoaster-type level by measuring the tempo and intensity of the song and generate the level accordingly. You scored points by collecting small blocks of light during the level, which were keyed to the beat of the song.

Just go play it.

Surf or DIE (to the beat of your music collection) in Audiosurf 2.

Anyway, Audiosurf 2 is looking fantastic. This time you control an actual surfer, and instead of scoring points for collecting blocks you’ll instead fly off jumps in the level created by sudden tempo changes. Once you’re up in the air you can use the mouse wheel and buttons to do all sorts of crazy flipping tricks. It’s stunning. The game is also prepped for extensive mod support, so expect more game modes from the community in the future.

We haven’t had a Rainbow Six game in a while now. This thought occurs to me as I was guided through Takedown, a tactical shooter very much in the vein of Rainbox Six—and with good reason, since Christian Allen, head of developer Serellan, used to make mods for that series before working on the Ghost Recon titles.

Playing cooperatively is the best way to enjoy Takedown. Every player chooses an infiltration point and is given free reign of a fully nonlinear environment. In our demo all four players started in the basement, but you could just as easily have all four on the roof or have two in each location sweeping opposite directions. It’s tense, even with three fellow squadmates, and extremely focused on realism.

Takedown: Red Sabre is shaping up to be an excellent tactical shooter in the vein of classic Rainbow Six games.

Case in point: “Wait, is there a way I can check our objective again?” says one of my teammates.

“You should’ve studied the briefing earlier," says a nearby developer. "This is real life, gentlemen."

It doesn’t matter—we all die thirty seconds later.

Matt Gilgenbach spent four years developing Retro/Grade, a rhythm-based shoot-em-up game. Then it came out to…nothing. No applause, no screaming Beatles-esque fans, no spell of Twitter acclaim. It existed at that odd confluence of great reviews, some critical buzz, but no real success.

Neverending Nightmares is one of the most disturbing indie games I've ever seen.

When Gilgenbach went back to make another game, he knew he needed something different—something people would notice. Something like Neverending Nightmares, his next project. In stark black, white, and red, playing through the game’s demo was oppressive and disturbing. Neverending Nightmares uses Gilgenbach’s OCD and clinical depression for inspiration; a number of the extremely graphic and disturbing images portrayed (such as one where the lead character pulls a vein out of his arm) are taken straight from intrusive thoughts he’s experienced. Terrifying and repulsive, yes, but also fascinating.

Contrast is a puzzle platformer, and while that genre is a dime a thousand these days, the developers over at Compulsion Games have come up with a fantastic gimmick that makes Contrast stand out from the crowd.

As you might expect, the core conceit of Contrast deals with light and dark. While the main game is played in three dimensions, you can seamlessly jump into the walls at any moment and become your own shadow, using other shadows for two-dimensional platforming sections.

Leap into your own shadow to solve puzzles in Contrast.

At one point, for instance, I had to reach the top of a carousel—the game takes place in a burlesque-inspired world. In three dimensions it was impossible, but I noticed the carousel horses casting shadows on the walls. I transformed into two dimensions and used the horse shadows to climb higher, then leapt back into my full form and landed on top of the carousel.

In my demo alone I ran through the carousel, a seedy nightclub, and a pirate-themed funhouse. If it can keep the same level of quality, Contrast is possibly the most creative 3D platformer since Pyschonauts.

The sequel to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Barkley 2 looks just as absurd and irreverent. The first game, a crazed Japanese RPG-style game about Charles Barkley—yes, the basketball player—and his travels through post-apocalyptic New York, is one of the best free titles in recent memory.

The sequel has gone legit, though. While the first game outright ripped sprites from classic games and mixed things together to create the game equivalent of a Girl Talk song, everything in the new game is built from scratch—presumably so the final product can actually be sold legally.

Barkley 2 looks ridiculous, but you need to go play Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden right now to understand why this sequel might be great.

That doesn’t mean developer Tales of Games has toned down the humor. You’ll play as cyborg Charles Barkley, complete with powder-blue mohawk, as you wander the open world of Necron 7. The game is also fairly ambitious, with the developers claiming the world changes over time without waiting for you, so you might miss out on some quests and gain access to others just because you spent an hour lost in the sewers.

Developer Vlambeer makes some great games. So great, in fact, that they tend to get…stolen. Last year’s Ridiculous Fishing, this year’s Luftrausers—Vlambeer’s games get cloned before they’re even out to the public.

Well not anymore, apparently. While Luftrausers is still unreleased, Vlambeer is already hard at work on a new title called Wasteland Kings, and this time they’re putting it in the public eye from the very beginning: the game will launch for early access soon, and much of the development is being livestreamed.

Much of Wasteland Kings' development process has been public knowledge—an early prototype of the game was even entered in the Molyjam 2013 game jam.

That’s good, because I’m already having withdrawal. Wasteland Kings is an apocalyptic Western with roguelike elements. Some horrible nuclear tragedy apparently befell this world, forcing you to kill to survive. Select your weird mutant character of choice (I played as a triangle with a single, gigantic eye) and you’ll be dumped into the world with just a gun and a prayer. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, and then you die.

Always Sometimes Monsters is a bit of a conundrum. It’s a game that claims choices matter, but it’s impossible to know how the extent of that statement when playing through a brief demo.

What’s interesting about Always Sometimes Monsters is the scale of the choices made. This isn’t your typical blockbuster game choice—you know, the “Save the world” or “Slaughter a puppy” type. Always Sometimes Monsters is about…life. As far as I can tell.

After the opening scenes, I took control of a literary agent hosting a party, trying to figure out who to fund next. I eventually chose a scruffy looking guy who promised we could toast with whiskey, but I could’ve just as easily chosen anyone else at the party—the blonde with her bottle of white wine, or the red-haired guy with his flask of brandy. Next I took control of the scruffy guy as he went to find his “partner”—gender-neutral for a reason, since when I walked outside I could choose from another twenty or so people as my love interest.

If you like tough choices, Always Sometimes Monsters is an indie game worth keeping an eye on.

If there are 20 options for both those decisions, we’re already talking 400 different ways the story could play out with just those two choices. 400. For two small choices right at the beginning of the game.

With something this modular, does any choice really matter? I guess we won’t really know until the full product comes out. Still, it’s an intriguing way to handle story in games and I’m curious how much depth is there.

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Toshiba PX35t review: This budget all-in-one is quick, stylish and a great choice for the student

Toshiba PX35t-A2210 $930.00 The Toshiba PX35t-A2210 is a relatively powerful all-in-one desktop machine. While it is more expensive than the rest of this field, it delivers the performance and features to back up its price tag.

If looks are your top priority, Toshiba’s PX35t-A2210 ($930 as of 8/30/13) will surely woo you with its slim, attractive design. This 23-inch AIO sports a glossy full HD touchscreen, modern-looking wireless peripherals, and a third-generation Intel Core i3-3120M processor. It also boasts 6GB of DDR3/1600 RAM, built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and a roomy 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive.

There's plenty to like about Toshiba's PX35t-A2210, but its sharply angular mouse isn't one of them.

But looks aren’t everything, and the PX35t-A2210 isn’t just a pretty centerpiece for your desk, it’s also a good all-around performer, delivering a Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score of 131. That means it’s nearly one-third faster than our baseline machine, the Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 . You won’t mistake the PX35t-A2210 for a top-of-the-line gaming machine, but it’ll do just fine managing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; surfing the Web and checking email; and streaming HD clips from Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

The PX35t-A2210 relies on the Intel HD 4000 Graphics processor integrated into its CPU, rather than a discrete graphics card, but it can still handle many graphics-related tasks without falling over and dying. It outperformed the rest of the field with our BioShock Infinite benchmark, for instance, delivering the game at 26.6 frames per second (albeit with resolution of just 1024 by 768 pixels and image quality at Low). It took a first-place finish with Dirt Showdown, too, delivering the game at 47 frames per second (here again, with resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels and image quality set to low). This PC won’t have any problem with less visually intense games, such as MMORPGs. Simpler photo- and video-editing tasks won’t be an issue, either.

The Desktop Worldbench 8.1 chart is repeated here, so you don't have to have to go back to the previous page to see an overall performance snapshot.

Toshiba outfitted the PX35t-A2210 with a glossy 23-inch multitouch screen with native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. It’s a very good display, but it’s not perfect. While it’s extremely bright, and images look crisp and clear on it, colors look a little dull and whites have a yellowish tint. It’s also not the most accurate touchscreen I’ve used. There were several moments in my testing when I accidentally hit the link below the one I was trying to tap. Multitouch gestures are smooth and seamless, but the glass has an ever-so-slightly tacky feeling to it, which can make gliding across its surface a little tough. But it’s a much better input device than the PX35t-A2210’s mouse, which is a modern-looking angular thing that felt uncomfortable and sharp in my hand. The keyboard, meanwhile, delivers shallow tactile feedback but accurate typing.

The Toshiba PX35t-A2210 is attractive, usable, and relatively powerful. It’s a great choice for college students looking to balance work and play, since it performs basic administrative tasks with ease and can also play streaming HD video without a hitch. It has excellent Harman/Kardon speakers (with a Sleep and Music feature that lets you play your digital media player through them), and an ample collection of other I/O ports: Four USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, and one HDMI input (so you can plug in a cable/satellite set-top box or a videogame console).

Editor's note: This all-in-one was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five all-in-ones we compared it to, here.

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Dell Latitude 3330 review: A budget laptop with great battery life but lousy performance

Dell Latitude 3330 $561.00 Sleek and lightweight, the budget-priced Dell Latitude 3330 makes a good first impression. But it has difficulty running even the most routine multimedia—much less games—because of its bare-bones...

If someone tells you “Dude! You’re gettin’ a Dell!” in reference to the Latitude 3330, run away. Dell makes plenty of good computers, but this isn’t one of them.

Admittedly, the Latitude 3330 didn’t burst into flames or poke anyone’s eye out during our testing. But you have many better choices in the same price range. Though one of the five budget notebooks in this roundup (HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000) delivered even lower performance than this one—probably because it has an even less powerful CPU than the Dell’s 1.5GHz Intel Core i3-2375m—the HP also costs $110 less than the Latitude 3330 and has a ten-point touchscreen. The Dell’s 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display doesn’t support touch, though its trackpad does support simple gestures such as two-finger scrolling.

ROBERT CARDINDell’s Latitude 3330 doesn't deliver the performance its price tag warrants.

The Latitude has only 4GB of DDR/1600 memory, but an open and readily accessible slot accommodates a second module to double its memory. Its puny 320GB, 5400-rpm hard drive is similarly easy to access and upgrade. And this is one of only two notebooks in our roundup to include a removable and upgradable battery (the other one again being the HP Pavilion).

One component that won’t be easy to swap out is the Dell Wireless 1504 single-band (2.4GHz), 1x1, 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, which delivers a physical link rate of just 150 megabits per second. The laptop doesn’t provide Bluetooth support, either. But it does have a gigabit ethernet interface.

Unlike most of the notebooks in this price range, the Latitude 3330’s chassis contains some aluminum elements that render it considerably more rigid than the other machines we looked at. The lid, on the other hand, is rather flimsy, and the display inside doesn’t feature edge-to-edge glass, as most of the others do.

The PCMark 7 Productivity element of our benchmark suite evaluates a system's performance with everyday office tasks.

The Latitude 3330’s display isn’t wide enough to accommodate a deck with both a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad, but the system’s arrow keys are full-size and not easily mistaken for anything else. Apart from not being backlit, the island-style keyboard is well designed and a joy to type on, delivering firm but springy tactile feedback. The Function keys in the top row play their traditional roles, so you’ll need to hold down the Fn key and tap them to access their alternative assignments, such as controlling a media player.

Benchmark performance

The Latitude 3330 tied for dead last in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark. Its overall score of 64 was more than 35 percent slower than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA. Drilling down into some of the individual benchmarks from that suite, I note that the Dell finished next to last in the PCMark7 Productivity benchmark and the BioShock Infinite test, beating out only the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

Connectivity and conclusion

Dell broke the pattern of Intel-powered laptops providing only one USB 3.0 port. The Latitude 330 boasts two, plus one USB 2.0 port that can charge a device whether the computer is awake or asleep. It doesn’t have an optical drive, but its media card reader supports both SD and MMC media.

ROBERT CARDINThe Dell Latitude 3330 is one of the lighter laptops we evaluated.

Dell follows the crowd by providing HDMI and VGA video outputs. Because the Latitude’s Wi-Fi adapter isn’t an Intel model, the system doesn’t support Intel’s WiDi wireless media-streaming. If your primary concern is long battery life, however, be aware that this machine turned in a first-place finish, running for 5 hours, 13 minutes. And you can quickly pull out a run-down battery and snap in a fresh one to double the laptop’s useful life. But that’s one of the system’s few truly bright spots.

We also reviewed this model as a small-business laptop. You can read that review here.

Editor's note: This notebook was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five notebooks we compared it to, here.

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Review: Razer's Kraken 7.1 headset delivers great virtual surround sound at a reasonable price

San Francisco’s a fine city, but like any major metropolitan area the most common option for housing is a “cozy” hole in the wall with little room for furniture, much less hefty, neighbor-vexing sound systems.

Enter the gaming headset: a decent pair of cans will offer an appreciable aural improvement in merry-making, whether you’re taking potshots at zombies or enjoying your new Britney Spears record. Razer’s latest is the Kraken 7.1, a gorgeous piece of equipment bedecked in the peripheral maker’s trademark black and green-LED motif. A mere $99 gets you two ear pieces (one for each ear), a mic, and a lengthy USB cable to plug it into your PC or Mac.

The Kraken 7.1 is comfortable, if a little gaudy.

I kid. Like any good technology arms race, the modern headset needs to do a bit more than serve up sound to command lofty prices. The Kraken has chosen to prey on my one weakness—virtual 7.1 surround sound, a game changer (in the right games) that would otherwise require setting up more studio monitors and audio cable than my humble abode has square footage for.

Last spring I lent an ear to Razer’s Tiamat 7.1 gaming headset, and enjoyed it immensely. It’s expensive ($200) and requires a 5.1 or (ideally) 7.1 surround-sound capable sound card or motherboard to be a worthwhile purchase. When you have all that, you’ll still spend a bit of time twiddling knobs to get the audio just right. But once that’s all set, the ten drivers built into the Tiamat’s ear pieces serve up a luscious surround-soundscape that’s just about worth the price of entry, if you’re picky about something as nebulous as sense of space and aural immersion in games.

The virtual surround sound emulated by the Kraken 7.1 makes a huge difference in games that support it.

Now cut the Tiamat's price tag in half, eliminate much of the fiddling, and you’ve got a solid idea of what to expect from the Kraken 7.1. The headset employs Razer’s 7.1 virtual surround sound tech; PCWorld’s Alex Wawro checked out the standalone version of Razer Surround earlier this summer, and approved. It’s actually rather neat, though you’ll need to install Razer’s Synapse 2.0 software to tweak any settings—par for the course with most of Razer’s new wares. Synapse will let you calibrate the surround sound, a simple process that involves looking at a circular diagram that shows where sound is supposed to originate from, then shutting your eyes and tapping your arrow keys or scrolling your mouse wheel until the audio clip “lands” in the right place.

Now, you can’t simply plug in 7.1 surround sound gear and expect a world of difference. While every modern game is technically capable of spitting out environmental audio that’s cognizant of your position, you’ll get the best results from titles that are optimized with this sort of technology in mind. I’ve found that first-person shooters tend to take far more care with crafting 7.1-friendly experiences; fire up titles like Metro: Last Light, Dead Space 3 or Battlefield 3 for best results.

7.1 surround sound makes a big difference in the way you play atmospheric first-person shooters like Metro: Last Light.

These games do a heck of a job employing aural tricks to plant you in a particular place and inundating you with audio cues that tip you off to the baddies lurking around you. It's especially valuable during firefight—battles bolstered by 7.1 surround sound audio are an event unto themselves. Better players than me will take advantage of being able to hear those telltale footsteps, but even occasionally knowing a backstab is coming a second or two before I’m dead is its own little reward.

Little of this would matter if the headset sounded terrible. Thankfully, this headset does not sound terrible! The Kraken 7.1 delivers clear, rich audio in both games and music without missing a beat. Need more bass? A bass boost setting lets you tweak lower frequencies. Want to tweak your mic? A few sliders let you adjust your voice input settings and adjust the ambient noise reduction sensitivity. Tired of buzzwords and want to get down to brass tacks? Dive into the equalizer and fiddle to your hearts content. Everything sounds great, and you can make it sound greater still by mucking around in Synapse.

The tiny LED at the tip of the boom mic shuts off so you know it's been muted.

Voice input comes care of a digital boom microphone tucks neatly into the left ear cup, and sounds great. The mic sits on a flexible arm so you can adjust it to your heart’s content, and a tiny mute button sits on the end so you can chew that sandwich without disturbing your squadmates; pressing the button shuts off the LED at the tip of the mic, a brilliantly simple way of letting you know when you’re transmitting or not. The headset is also incredibly comfortable: the big, comfy ear cups wrap tightly around around my head, and while they won’t block out the outside world they will give you a cloistered audio experience—you’ll want to turn the volume down.

The Kraken 7.1 isn’t perfect. I always complain about wires, and this is a wired headset. But there’s a slight difference here. Many newer headsets bundle some sort of volume control gadget—the Plantronics Rig and Razer Tiamat both come equipped with a volume puck or brick that the headset plugs into. This leaves you with quite a bit of slack as you’ll only need to negotiate the distance between headset and puck, which will be within arms reach. The Kraken 7.1 needs to be plugged directly into your PC, which can be a hassle. In my case, that’s behind some monitors, around the back of my fairly large desk, and into the rear of my PC. If you’re gaming on a laptop, you’ll be fine. In my case I still had a fair amount of slack, but less than I’d like.

On a related note: mayhaps I’m spoiled, but it’s been years since I’ve used a headset that didn’t feature some kind of on-the-fly volume control, something the Kraken 7.1 is sorely lacking. The audio shortcut keys on my keyboard work in a pinch, but we don’t all have keyboards with loads of extra buttons on them.

I also ran into two technical issues. One was my own fault: my teammates complained that my voice sounded buzzy, as if I were transmitting from inside a hornet nest. I took a quick trip to the rear of my computer, switched USB ports and the problem was solved. The second issue was a bit odder—my review unit’s right earpiece is decidedly louder than the left. A quick trip to Windows’ volume mixer fixed the balance issue, but I’m still troubleshooting what the cause could be and lamenting that Razer’s Synapse serves up all sorts of bells and whistles, but doesn’t offer a simple Left-to-Right audio balance toggle.

So what are you paying for exactly? Truth be told, the Kraken 7.1 feels a lot like the original Kraken Pro ($80) with Razer’s surround sound technology baked into its configurator. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—Razer Surround will start to cost $20 next year, so the Kraken 7.1 is essentially taking an updated version of existing hardware and bundling the software into the price.

Is the Kraken 7.1 worth $100? Sure. But if you already own a pair of stereo headsets you’re in love with, grab Razer’s Surround software instead. If you loathe wires, I’ve been rather smitten by the Creative Sound Blaster Tactic3D Rage ($90) for some time now, though it admittedly isn’t as comfortable. And if you’ve got even more cash to spend—as well as a sound card—get the Razer Tiamat, which is awesome. But if you’re right in the middle—demanding comfort, don’t mind wires, and want a solid 7.1 surround sound experience without spend beaucoup bucks—the Kraken 7.1 headset is an excellent choice.

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Why the NFL and YouTube would make such great teammates

I'm a long-suffering Philadelphia Eagles fan. Not only am I apparently destined to be perennially underwhelmed by the team's on-field results, but as a resident of New York City, I'm forced to make my way down to the local sports bar where I'm subject to the conversational whims of inebriated Giants fans. Since I’m not a DirecTV subscriber and therefore don’t have access to the NFL Sunday Ticket offering, the local sports bar is my lot in life if I ever want to watch my team on television on most Sundays.

But there may be a glimmer of light in the distance: According to reporting from AllThingsD, Google has begun early negotiations with the National Football League about putting out-of-market NFL games on YouTube. This could prove to be a wonderful thing, for both Google and for NFL fans.

First, we must note that these are little more than conversations between two large corporate entities. Companies have conversations all the time, but that rarely means that anything will come of it. Heck, Yahoo was having conversations with Mark Zuckerberg about buying Facebook back in 2006. Still, Google teaming up with the NFL at this particular time would make sense for a variety of reasons.

First, Google has a lot of money—certainly enough to best DirecTV’s $1 billion-a-year deal with the NFL (and Google has been more than willing to engage in billion dollar deals as of late). For its part, the NFL may indeed be interested in teaming up with Google, but at the very least is willing to let DirecTV—whose contract ends at the end of this season—know that it has other pigskin suitors.

Google has been on the fringe of TV for years, but has never been quite able to make its way into the endzone of the American living room. This is something the NFL can help with. Hands-down, professional football is the most popular sport in the United States. And aside from the eyeballs and attention it brings, NFL games carry the cachet of being all-American, mainstream, apple pie. It was arguably the NFL that gave legitimacy to the upstart Fox network (then associated with low-brow fare like Married with Children) when it first won the rights to broadcast NFC games in 1994.

Mainstream cachet—and ubiquity—is something that Google desperately wants right now for its video-on-demand options. This is particularly true now as the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant may have finally discovered the key to America’s collective living room in the form of Chromecast. At only $35, Google’s little TV dongle will give every modern TV access to the Web via Google in a way that Google TV has never been able to accomplish over the past three years. Since its introduction last month, Chromecast has sold at a brisk pace—so much that Google has had problems keeping up with demand.

It is also important to note that Google was represented in its talks with the NFL not only by CEO Larry Page but by YouTube content boss Robert Kyncle as well. YouTube has been steadily building its brand recognition as an original content studio, rather than a mere conduit for adorable cat videos and other meme-ish oddities. In just the past year, YouTube has championed paid subscriptions for its popular channels, established original content events like Comedy Week and Geek Week, and re-vamped its mobile app to make it more Chromecast-friendly (and therefore, friendlier to living rooms as well).

Whatever happens, Google appears to be making all the right moves to make YouTube a content network, not just a user-submitted video repository.

Easy polyscreen access to America's favorite game might be coming soon.

As consumers lurch over the tipping point of comfort with streaming content, there is increasing competition to become the go-to conduit for streaming-to-TV access with suitors in the form of Microsoft, Apple, Roku, and countless others.

The NFL could prove to be just the product that could tie America’s heart to one preferred medium—as the league did for Fox two decades ago. And as with Fox in the early 1990s, Google may be willing to take a financial loss with expensive NFL rights—at least, at first—as the real return on investments will be further down the line in the form of brand legitimacy.

This is all conjecture, of course, but a theoretical YouTube NFL channel would give fans more affordable access to the out-of-market game across multiple screens. (It's very unlikely the NFL would give up very lucrative in-market network TV deals for now.) Unlike with DirectTV, YouTube would be able to offer access to just the NFL channel. Currently, Direct TV requires users to buy a DirecTV home subscription when available. (The provider does offer online access to Sunday Ticket without a home connection for $300-a-season, but only when DirecTV is not available).

Google could certainly offer a better deal than this. In the process it might sell a lot of Chromecasts and—more importantly—get more eyeballs acquainted with YouTube on the TV.

For the 2013–14 season, Sunday Ticket remains a DirecTV exclusive. So for the next several Sundays, as I’m forced to interact with with drunks recalling all of the Giants’ past Super Bowl victories, I will have at least some hope that in the not-too-distant future, I may yet get access to the NFL in the comfort of my own living room.

Evan lives in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys writing about what future may hold and taking long romantic walks on the beach.
More by Evan Dashevsky

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