$1600 Kickstarter campaign aims to turn Chromecast into multiplayer games console

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In what must be one of the smallest Kickstarter campaigns ever, a team of British developers called Concept96 is seeking just £1000 ($1600) to turn Chromecast into a multiplayer games platform. The first planned app is a quiz game, described in the rather charmingly amateurish video above: Buzzb.

The target market is ‘casual gaming’ for those who wouldn’t spend the money to buy a conventional games console but would enjoy occasional games on a device they already own … 

Smartphones serve as input devices, while the TV screen is the primary focus. Unlike text-based quiz apps, Buzzb will rely heavily on multimedia context like YouTube videos, web images and Soundcloud audio. If quiz games aren’t your thing, Concept96 is keen to emphasise that this is just the first step in what they see as a new gaming format.

The team has an interesting approach to in-app purchases: if one person downloads premium content, that content is available to everyone they play with – locally initially, online also if they hit their £15k ($24,000) stretch target.

Pledges start at £5 ($8) to get the Buzzb app with all premium content included, £10 ($16) gets you onto the beta-tester program and £20 ($32) gives you all future games and premium content free of charge.

You can support the project over at Kickstarter.

Google recently added a Backdrop feature to Chromecast, allowing it to display background content like news, weather and your Google+ photos when the device is not in use.