Nvidia had somewhat of an uphill battle ahead of them when the revealed the Shield. The small device that is essentially a controller with a screen debuted at CES this year, with the company boasting about its ability to play Android titles. Ok, and?

The main feature that many have been looking forward to concerning the Shield is its ability to stream PC titles onto its screen, effectively allowing you to play your PC titles on a smaller screen, using a controller. Genius, right? Regardless, it’s somewhat impressive, if not gimmicky, technology, but with the announcement of the Shield’s price it’s just turned into ridiculous.

Nvidia is currently accepting pre-orders for the device, which officially goes on sale next month for the not so cheap price of $ 349 (around R3200). The Shield will ship with a Tegra 4 mobile processor, a pretty powerful piece of hardware in the Android market. The Shield will feature a screen that is capable of displaying images in 720p, as well as being multitouch. However, are you prepared to pay anything close to that for the Shield?

Let me put it into a little bit of perspective; first up, no one would ever pay that for Android titles. Ever. Next, PC streaming is still a bit too gimmicky to justify that price. On top of that, streaming will only work with GPU’s in Nvidia’s 600 series, meaning that you’ll need to fork out a pretty penny for a GPU in the first place. Then again, why not just use the money you’d spend on this and put it towards a new GPU or a second one to SLI, if you have a few notes burning holes in your jeans.

What exactly am I trying to say. Don’t buy this; don’t even look in its general direction. Seriously, this is not something you should be spending money on. Much like the Wii U and PlayStation Vita. Do you want to wake up sad every morning like owners of these gaming platforms?

eGamer