Kickstarter link
I know Wyatt and I tweeted about this when the Kickstarter was first launched, but has anybody else been following this? The concept is an interesting one: a cheap (sub-$100, at least for Kickstarter backers), Rubik's-Cube-sized game console — essentially Tegra-powered cell phone guts sans battery and screen — running a custom version of Android with a ten-foot UI and non-Google store. Unlike traditional game consoles, which require hefty fees for developer kits, anyone with an Ouya can develop an Ouya game and publish it on the Ouya store.
As I write this it's at about $6.8 million with about 68 hours to go, so there's clearly a lot of interest. The concept reminds me more than a little of the Kindle Fire: hardware sold very nearly at cost with a heavily customized (and notably de-Googleized) version of Android built around a custom store, where Ouya will hopefully make money on content. This razor-and-blades business model has been a mainstay of console gaming for decades; the difference is by opening up development to anybody, there's potentially a lot more blades to make money on.
Speaking of money, a unique requirement of the Ouya store is that all games are required to have at least some gameplay to be available for free. This isn't the bold "all games will be free!" move it's been played as, though, as a demo qualifies as "some gameplay." What Ouya's really doing is formally requiring developers to make demos available for their games, which everybody really should be doing anyway. So it's worth noting that, while some games will be free-to-play, others will only really be free-to-try, and this isn't a bad thing: the "freemium" or ad-based business models really suck for some games. Like
Final Fantasy III, which is presently the only confirmed Ouya game with a set release window (it will launch with the system in March).
This lack of confirmed content — indeed, the lack of confirmed
anything — has led to the harshest criticism of the project, with some commentators calling the whole thing a bunch of smoke and mirrors and others questioning the feasibility of Ouya's claimed timetables. And it's true that very little has been confirmed at this stage: the Ouya will get a customized version of the Android port of
Final Fantasy III and have access to a few streaming services — Hulu+ and Vevo and twitch.tv — and that's about all we know at this point. The "screens" of the interface show game tiles with names like
Minecraft and
Madden NFL, but those are really just concept mockups, leading some forumites to charge Ouya with trying to mislead people. (In the Kickstarter video, Ouya founder Julie Uhrman breathlessly says "You'll be able to play
Minecraft on it!" If you read Notch's actual comment, it's more like "If people are interested, we'll put
Minecraft on it, sure." Just optimistic or intentionally misleading? You be the judge.)
So what
will people get for their $99? A beautiful (it's designed by Yves Behar!), hackable box without many confirmed games but with a world of potential. For some people, like me, that's enough. (They've already pre-sold about 50,000 of the things, and if there's that many people who like the concept enough to pay for it sight unseen months in advance on promise/hype alone, I have to think that they won't have trouble attracting interest from at least the indie and mobile-focused devs.)
I'm not saying it'll outsell the PS3 any time soon, but I could see it taking off as a Roku-style media streamer with more gaming prowess. The Roku is a tiny box made by a tiny company, too, and you can buy them at Walmarts and Targets and you can play
Angry Birds on them. So this whole "startup making a games console" thing probably isn't impossible. In fact, there's clearly so much pent-up demand for a device like Ouya that I'm kicking myself for not having started a games console startup myself. (If I were Roku, I'd be watching Ouya very closely, checkbook in hand.)
In any case, Ouya is interesting as yet another example of a company taking Android and essentially routing around Google. I'm waiting for someone like Samsung to do the same. Why wouldn't they? At this point, it's clear that most people aren't exactly buying Android phones for access to Google Play, and the geeks who
are are the same geeks who are going to root their device right away anyway. Samsung should pull an Amazon and just put Galaxy Store or whatever on their phones. They'd get much closer to that Apple-style whole widget experience, and they'd get 30% of their users' app purchases (and for a company with much lower hardware margins, that extra revenue could be a Big Deal). Google wouldn't be happy about them piggy-backing on top of Android while taking control of the important bits, but so what? As long as they had the biggest apps available right away, it's doubtful most users would care.
Anyway, this post is already too long, so whatever. Has anybody else been following Ouya? Anyone else bold/stupid enough to back it? For me, the biggest concern is that the whole "open development of TV apps on a mobile-style platform" is the exact space that the app-enabled Apple TV is going to occupy. I can see that
murdering this thing.
But I figure if nothing else, it'll be a pretty paperweight.
