PCFormat Forum Archive

$99 Ouya wants to bust down console gaming’s walled gardens
Controller-equipped, Android-based system gives indies access to the TV.

Since the days of the great Atari crash, the history of game consoles has been one of increasingly powerful walled gardens. Massive companies exercise tight control over what games can be released on their platform, how often, and at what price. But that model is starting to look a little outdated. We live in a world where iOS is succeeding as a game platform with thousands of lightly regulated titles, where even hardcore games like Team Fortress 2 are making the free-to-play model work, and where PC developers often make more money when they control the price of their own games.

Those are the kinds of business developments that are motivating the team behind Ouya, a $99, Android 4.0-based TV game console project launching on Kickstarter today. Ouya is promising to provide a more open, hackable, and flexible gaming environment than the console market has ever seen before.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman—who’s had executive experience at GameFly, IGN, and Vivendi Universal—thinks it's about time the console market learned from the success other platforms have seen recently by opening up. “It’s ironic, all the growth in gaming is moving to mobile platforms, [and] we’re seeing a lot of AAA developers leaving their console shops to go to mobile, yet three out of every four dollars is still spent in the living room, a majority of gaming time is still spent on the TV, and if you survey any gamer they’ll tell you their No. 1 platform is the TV.”

The increasing expense and complications of getting a game on to a console are forcing developers onto other platforms, Uhrman said. It's leading to a situation where the consoles are “stuck with sequel after sequel versus new created games and IP because it’s too expensive and no one wants to take a risk as something new. … We just think the time is really right. Nothing new came out of E3 [hardware-wise], and everybody’s feeling a little tired. It’s interesting because around the time of E3, everyone was asking if consoles were dead. We don’t think consoles are dead, we just think it’s time to rethink the way we do business.”

Hackable hardware

...

Oh yeah! Ouya receives over $1M in crowdfunding in less than 8 hours
Hackable, Android-based game console on pace to break Kickstarter records.

Since Ouya first unveiled its plans for a controller-equipped, Android-based TV game console this morning, many have been wondering if the open, indie-friendly console could attract a significant following. It turns out it could—the console has surpassed its ambitious $950,000 Kickstarter funding goal in just under eight hours.

For context, the $1 million pledged to Ouya as of this writing is more than the first-day Kickstarter haul for the Pebble smartwatch. That project brought in under $1 million in first day funding on its way to becoming the largest Kickstarter project ever, with a haul of over $10 million total.

It's a great debut for Ouya, but not quite enough to prove that the system will be a mass market success on the scale of its existing console competition. Despite the large funding numbers, only about 8,000 people have so far signed up to own the console. The Xbox 360, by comparison, was still selling over 5,000 units a day in the US alone in May, during a relatively slow month nearly six years after its initial release (and in a market already saturated with tens of millions of Xbox 360s).

Perhaps it's unfair to compare a startup like Ouya to an established marketing and manufacturing behemoth like Microsoft, but consumers (and major developers) will definitely be making that comparison when deciding where to put their console dollars. Then again, those 8,000 Ouya backers include at least three that pledged over $10,000 each, showing the kind of passion that has a tendency to be contagious among these kinds of projects. If that kind of passion can spread outside the niche of early adopting, hardware-obsessed hackers to a more general gaming audience, the Ouya might actually succeed in bringing significant change to the way console games are funded and distributed.