If this indeed evolved into a stand alone, curated app store like Steam pre 2016 with a 88/12 revenue split it could indeed shake up Android game distribution. Mobile in general and Android in particular is such a brutal market for small indie developers. Epic could pull a Valve here.
"The chips that produce an electric field for the Solar Probe Cup are made from tungsten, a metal with the highest known melting point of 6,192 F (3,422 C). Normally lasers are used to etch the gridlines in these chips—however due to the high melting point acid had to be used instead."
I had no idea tungsten was used to make ICs. What kind of density is achieved by laser etching (on tungsten or otherwise)?
I originally did. This was fine when the scripting was just doing data setup in advance, and it wasn't being run per-frame as game logic. When I started The Spatials V3 (aka Galactology) I also started doing real time game logic in s7. After enough code it became clear that the fastest purely interpreted scheme wasn't fast enough to be put into a soft real time path (the game grew up to hundreds of systems, in the ECS sense).
So I made a 6 months long gameplay development freeze last year and I converted all the s7-flavored Scheme code into the l2l Lisp dialect with a custom transpiler (which had to be aware of all the s7-ism plus my own s7 reader macros), and replaced the C++ binding layer with sol2. This resulted in a ten-fold increase in performance when the game is limited by logic perf (it's not visible with an empty new game). LuaJIT is alien technology for all I know.
I'm beating my own drum here, but the gameplay code for my game Galactology is 90%+ done in a Lisp dialect (l2l with LuaJIT underneath), clocking at 51K lines currently. It has been a huge productivity boost since I switched from C++ two years ago, but I do miss some level of typing and static checking.
http://thespatials.com/
I think the article is wrong to call the showcased devices "netbooks". Netbooks were a laptop-lite, with a slightly smaller size. The Dragonbox Pyra is more like a micro laptop, the size of two big smartphones stacked on top of each other. It's a different size category and that's what makes it interesting.