Would gaming on the center display be a feature you would use if it was part of an OTA? Would you pay for it as an OTA?

Would gaming on the center display be a feature you would use if it was part of an OTA?


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Sweetwater

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Why does anyone consider this ? I am not buying a car to play games in.
Don't we have enough devices to play games on in this world ? I want to
drive and enjoy the Mach. All of this sounds like causing trouble to the car.
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timbop

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Why does anyone consider this ? I am not buying a car to play games in.
Don't we have enough devices to play games on in this world ? I want to
drive and enjoy the Mach. All of this sounds like causing trouble to the car.
For road tripping, when you'll be sitting idle for 30-45 minutes every few hours.
 

Gimme_my_MME

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What about some simple, group games to keep kids entertained? Like Where's Waldo? or spot the difference type games that anyone in any seat can participate in
 

PeeCee

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Like others answered, if it was free, I'd probably poke at it here and there, and maybe to keep my kids busy on a road trip and we need to charge for a long period of time. But I would never leave me house to go in my car to start gaming lol

Give me a few free small games, like tetris, bejeweled and yeah, I could see myself playing them during long charges while I give my kids my phone to play their games on.
 


JamieGeek

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* cries in former game developer and current front-end developer *

That's not how any of this works…

Note: I don't have any direct knowledge with Ford's engineering decisions for the Mach-E. This is from my days working with consoles to release games + supporting material, and my current work in front-end development.

Even though the rendering engine is effectively a web browser, to open up general browsing opens up a huge host of problems that need constant gardening and support. There's a vast amount of features that aren't needed for the car's UI, but required for general browsing. Autofill your passwords? Credit cards? History Management? Permissions management? Now you need to fix and change when the next vulnerability is discovered and deploy immediately… and all this is tied to the functionality of a car.

When using a HTML engine in an embedded context, it's more about deciding what feature set you need to deliver your user experience. In some cases, add custom code to do custom functions (think plug-ins). By allowing a location bar, there's a lot more to work in ensuring the security and usability of the entire device. That's a lot of work for work and ongoing maintenance for activity -- which will never match the quality of the user's own phone.

It's not that any of this is impossible. But I don't see how full user exposed browsing adds value to the experience of the car. Especially with the added development costs and risks involved. Especially when your phone will do a better job.

In other words, it is not as simple as enabling a flag.
Ok sure not as simple as enabling a flag but the bulk of the work is done with the HTML engine.

In several of my projects simply adding Chromium reduced the work effort by years and adding the extra stuff becomes almost trivial at that point.

(Yes a lot of us are software developers on here.)
 

PeeCee

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That is precisely the use case, not playing games in your driveway.
Yeah, but the problem is you can't ask people to create games or the price for the liscences so people potentially play once a week for 15 mins?

Especially if you are going to charge home, that is not even 15 mins a week. In my case, it would probably 2-3 times a year. So if I don't have that feature, I won't be sad, but it's a welcomed small bonus.
 

GoGoGadgetMachE

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What about some simple, group games to keep kids entertained? Like Where's Waldo? or spot the difference type games that anyone in any seat can participate in
This is a key point being missed here and, I'd add, by Tesla as well.

If you're roadtripping by yourself, that's one thing. But as soon as you add the significant other and/or kids, you're dealing with multiple devices already for single-player games already, so at that point, "well I don't want to carry a device for the driver" is a bit of a specious argument to me...

that would be a reason to pay for the hotspot, potentially - wi-fi only tablets are a lot less than LTE-enabled and in fact are incredibly inexpensive for the kind of people that can buy a Mach-E. WalMart had some craptastic (eg for kids) tablets for like $30 over Black Friday week, and Amazon regularly has Fire tables for under $100. Even iPads can be bought under $400.
 

BlueMach

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Why does anyone consider this ? I am not buying a car to play games in.
Don't we have enough devices to play games on in this world ? I want to
drive and enjoy the Mach. All of this sounds like causing trouble to the car.
Because it's *fun* to have. That's why. Not to mention that on a road trip, it provides something to do while charging. I want to drive and enjoy my Mach-E too, but I also would LOVE a real game streaming service on the car that would allow me to hop into an Xbox game via the cloud while charging, or watching YouTube, etc.
 

JamieGeek

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You know: If you're stopped to charge for 30-45 minutes it would be far healthier to go for a short walk around the lot than it would be to sit in the car and play games or watch videos. (I believe that it is even recommended to take a short walk for every 3ish hours you're sitting anyway.)

Yes of course this assumes a few things:
  • It is a safe area to do so
  • There is something interesting to walk around (a Walmart lot not so much--you can go into Walmart and walk around, however)
  • There is enough lighting/it isn't dark out
  • It isn't raining or snowing (if its snowing you really should be home anyway right?? ;) )
 

Sweetwater

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I really do believe you will have many people gathered around
your Mach to keep you busy answering questions !! :)
The only thing this thread is good for is to keep us busy
while we wait.
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