While everyone seems to be commenting on the impact this will have on hardware manufacturers, I'm more excited about the impact this will have on the big software distributors. I would love to see a disruption to the likes of EA.
The console video gaming world has become, mostly, stagnant; full of sequels upon sequels. Current games are chocked full of DRM for overplayed, non-innovative titles. The market has become less about making great games that people love, and more about making executives money. It's terribly depressing and is directly responsible for me stopping my, over 25 year, love of gaming.
I, along with others, have doubts about the platform. However, I would absolutely love to see it affect some change in what the video gaming market has mostly become. I would love to see more independent developers making lots of money and pumping out cool, fun to play, games on a system that is accessible beyond the PC.
Honestly, when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.
when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.
Mmmmmm, how deliciously condescending. I wonder if that's how musicians, actors, and iOS developers feel? I make software for desktops, so I respect my target audience (of course, frivolous workstation abuse is quite common, but it's too much effort to maintain a high horse for all those edge cases)
See, I know what you're trying here, but bear with me for a moment.
First, what is condescending about a simple statement of fact?
Games are frivolous (by definition, see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frivolous) activities which are pursued for pleasure; if you would like to argue about professional gaming, I'll posit that that applies to a small enough part of the target audience that we won't need to consider it--everybody else plays for fun.
Game consoles are single-function devices whose purpose is to consume carefully-curated content. They aren't made to write art, games, or software; they aren't made to help you create music; and they aren't made to help you pay rent.
Knowing this--and let's not even go into the absurd and abusive criticism that a lot of games get, for better or worse!--and knowing that your audience will never use what you've given them to create anything, and that you probably (given the deathgrip publishers/vendors have on the console industry) didn't even get a fair shake in the production of your title, why would you think of console gamers as anything else?
Seriously, why? Literally your entire interaction with them is that they buy consoles, buy games for the consoles, play the games, and then praise or damn those games on the internet. Oh, and probably trade in the game as soon as there is a reason for doing so.
Contrast this with, for example, how we treat other programmers. We submit bug reports, we release new code, we do things as a community. I believe that this is so because we know the people who receive our work are using it to do something, and that they are capable of creating their own things which one day we too may use. This is not the consumer relationship that console gamers enjoy with publishers.
iOS or mobile developers I would be hesitant to speculate on. I will, however, point out that a lot of freemium apps are driven by ad revenue, and a lot of games are monetized by clever application of psychology to trap the dollars of "whales"--so, please, draw your own conclusions about the sort of respect they must have for their consumers.
Actors and musicians I'll not speculate on either, mostly because there is a big difference to me between buying a device whose only purpose is consumption and buying a ticket to go enjoy an experience--the goods in question are a great deal different.
I would tend to agree, especially as the other pull models for content consumption are a lot better in every meaningful way.
TV's entire model is funded by advertising, the sole purpose of which is to get you to buy things. So, again, I wouldn't take it over, say, a PC where I occasionally stream/pirate videos or, even better, pay artists directly for the performances I enjoy.
Talking about frivolity on the internet while posting from a device with several editors open and getting work done. There is a large difference between choosing to do something fun and frivolous, and choosing to lock yourself into a platform that forces you to consume.
No there is no significant difference. Both are a choice to be frivolous. At least the gamers don't have your arrogance or cognitive dissonance to think otherwise.
So any consumer of content deserves simply scorn and
ridicule?
That's not what I said--please don't put words in my mouth. I did not expand my definition to include any consumer of content, and I did not suggest anything other than that developers have no reason to view their target audience as anything other than entities paying for their product--they have no reason to see them as people with feelings and emotions, they have no reason to see them as independent creative beings, they have no reason to see them as anything other than actors in a marketplace.
Forgive me for not according to gamers qualities that on the whole we can't know.
(and, hazarding a guess from your username: come now, what would Heinlen say about your imprecision of argument?)
No imprecision here. You scorned the users for being consumers of "carefully curated" content. I guess the only way I was imprecise at all was that I didn't cater for you respect of those on "non-carefully curated" content, but given how incendiary the original was, I figured this was just splitting hairs. But you still didn't answer the question as to why not just be open about your position.
Android is giving me hope for the future of general purpose computing.
With the nexus 7 finally bringing a non-sucky open tablet to market, and Ouya proving that users and developers want open (Or at the very least that open products have a chance in the market.), I'm feeling more comfortable with a technology landscape full of tablets, smartphones and purpose specific devices like gaming consoles.
Well, Android IS the long awaited "Year of Linux on the desktop", only it's not on the desktop, because the desktop is no longer the center of the consumer digital world.
I'm also happy that an open-source based operating system is becoming the mainstream. It's an exciting time to be a developer or an entrepreneur :) (these technologies becoming mainstream enable so many things, I don't know where to start!).
The "naysayers" as you say, bring up a lot of valid points that have nothing to do with the OUYA's ability to raise kickstarter money so this will probably not silence anyone.
If anything, the money raised only proves the fact that over 60k people jumped in on the bandwagon of a non-existent console with no controller design that plans to ship in an almost unrealisable timeframe.
I want people that try bold things to succeed as much as the next guy but my (and others') concerns about the OUYA are far more elaborated than their ability to raise money.
Even if this fails (I don't expect it to but of course it could), I'm willing to throw some money at serious research into what's so hard about making tiny $99 consoles, and how to address those problems in the next project.
Could you clarify? Do you mean that it's harder to make these things smaller? Because that's not what "Economies of scale" refers to.
Even if you are trying to make a point about the long run average cost of console production, I still don't see the direct connection and I'd like to know what you're getting at.
Xbox 360s were sold at a loss until years after launch. (MS made their money on license sales from games.) At a production run of a few tens of thousands, the Ouya is not much better off than a full-custom hardware build, and it's difficult to make such a box for ~$100.
The sort of design one would want in a forward-thinking console wouldn't be offered in small quantities, certainly not for 99 bucks without subsidization.
It's fascinating to me that so many people think of the Ouya as a potential rival to PS/360 - I don't. I see it as a completely different beast.
Funny, from Day 1, I've always looked at the Ouya as a cheaper Boxee Box that also plays some games as gravy.
If it can do MAME or Final Burn (which I expect some enterprising hackers will have made a reality by the time Ouya's available for the masses), even better.
I'll probably pick one up when it's released to play videos and music, and hopefully there are some good games on it, especially if that Namco-Bandai relationship turns out to be real. If the games all suck, it's no loss, because I'll still have XBMC. If the Ouya team's paying attention, they'll also make sure Netflix is available on day one too.
It's interesting to note some figures; if you assume $50 US per ouya that's $2,910,350 or 33% of the collected costs to make the hardware; double that to a guess of $100 per unit and you looking at ~68% of the collected Kickstarter.
Realistically the hardware is probably relatively cheap to manufacture in bulk, and it'll probably end up towards the $50 rather than $100 mark, especially if they decide not to upgrade to newly released hardware.
I thought that sounded odd. All have a controller, the second is 'limited edition brown'.
As for costs.. i am guessing they will probably make an order for 100k? (They have the cash, plenty of time for more pre-orders, and surely expect to sell some after launch, and they are tiny so easy to store). At those quantities my guess for a cost breakdown; SOC; $15, nand $3, wireless radios $6, case $5, power $4, controller $10, battery $2. So i think $50 is realistic, they will need FCC certification etc. Keep in mind they are (planning) making them for almost 9 months out, tegra 4 will no doubt be out, nand prices will be lower, tiny case, low power, cheap looking controller (sorry).
Limited edition brown... Microsoft already tried that with a consumer electronics device. And that's all anyone remembers of that line of hardware. I gotta wonder, why brown?
As cool as I think this whole thing is, honestly I think they're going to need a lot more money than that what was raised on Kickstarter to be a serious contender.
$8,580,682 (from 63,277 backers) - keep perspective guys. 60k - That's like one week of sales of one of the consoles in Japan only. And those aren't even pushed units numbers. Not to mention amount of money that rolls in the likes of EA titles. It's all nice and all, but nowhere near disruptive word.
Woah, let them actually make the thing and bring it to market before you write them off. It's grossly unfair to compare their fundraising efforts to the total sales of established console games... At this point, anyway.
I'm not writing them off - in fact I'm cheering up their effort. With this I was trying to say what it looks like in larger perspective. OUYA has a really, REALLY big hurdle in front of themselves in order for us to call them disruptive. OUYA being a success or not (more likely), one thing is for sure - I'm starting to like all these multi million projects on kickstarter. Big budgets and not from an investment company.
Why is it unfair? They (despite claims that, honestly, just don't make a lot of sense) want to be treated seriously. This is treating them seriously. Their platform, which by the way is not a "quick port" from Android if you care about user experience, has a tiny user base compared either to consoles or phones.
I'd like to see them do well, but I'm personally not going to treat it as something special until they show that it is. So far it sounds like a shovel-ware conduit to the TV and that gets people nothing.
That it hasn't yet released doesn't mean we don't know what we're looking at in terms of a market. 60,000 committed users is a spectacularly tiny user base.
I'd bet money (and am in fact betting my own time, which isn't entirely dissimilar) that the userbase of modern Android devices--say, from as far back as the Nexus One phone to the current Nexus 7 tablet--is so much bigger that if even one in twenty users care about games it's a more viable market.
60,000 pre-orders for a completely unknown company months before launch is not small. Usually they sell more once the thing is actually in stores, and they already have the best kind of marketing they can get, hype and people putting dollars into it before a physical product exists.
Yes, the big console makers sell that many every week, but they are not a big console maker, so they don't need lots of numbers to sustain themselves, that's what growth is for, and they are showing better indications of it then Nintendo or Sony when they first got on the market, assuming they actually deliver the product they will see more. and their price point puts them in closer competition to a PS2 or Roku.
For them, the hardware order isn't small, no. However, they're pricing it so low that they're almost certainly making very little money per-unit, so they're hoping to make money on their app store.
To make money on their app store, they need games.
Not many developers are going to write games for a platform with around 1/16th of the user base of your average front-line Android phone. (Please don't say "it's an easy port"; it's not and the Ouya people's claim that it is is fucking dishonest.)
A few companies have committed to bringing their products to the Ouya. I am interested in seeing how many of them follow through. Of those who follow through, I am interested in how many just push shovelware because doing a real port to a platform with 60,000 guaranteed users, many of which are probably going to be hacking the shit out of the thing (and making software security a non-starter), is not economically viable for most people.
I'm sure the argument goes that ouya users are "proper gamers" - which is great but it's only really worthwhile if you also can charge "proper game" fees of $10+
The scale isn't there for a freemium or $0.99 app economy.
You don't need to own the market to disrupt the market. Even if they don't sell a single unit beyond the preorders, selling 60k units of a gaming device is enough to make studios take notice that there is a demand. Compare it with minor political parties, where the goal often isn't to become president but rather to force the hands of larger, established parties.
Yeah, even if it influences the Xbox Arcade (and Sony, Nintendo competitors) then it could have an impact on the market simliar to the Steam effect.
Every July and December gamers on Steam go crazy over sales - twice yearly excitement in general that the big three consoles only get at launch and with major title releases every few years.
What we can take away from this, and i hope the major console makers do this as well is, that many people (especially developers of course) want a more open and friendly console market. This basically embodies what the rumours wanted Valve to do with their own pc-based console.
Very impressive! If I were Google, I'd buy the company immediately. With Google's backing, they could go into production with more speed, maybe even using the Nexus Q's USA-based manufacturer. I think once they've release the first Ouya, Google should start working on putting in more Google TV and Nexus Q features.
That's exactly what I don't want to see. Yet another device tied in to Google. For me, all the promise of the Ouya is in doing things independently, not tied to the mission of a corporate behemoth.
If corporate behemoths want in, they can do the same thing as everyone else and write SN app for it.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think Google would do much of anything to tie the Ouya to its 'corporate behemoth' mission. Besides, I believe that Google's immense power could improve Ouya's standing by backing it thoroughly.
Some people are concerned about the hardware, whether or not the specs will start to get outdated when the product finally ships (Q1/Q2 2013).
Another point is the openness, it being so open for not only software hacks but also hardware hacks, will it also produce a lot of cheaters in online multiplayer games?
I pledged, and personally, I can't wait to get my hands on it! I think the media player capabilities and Android compatibility will make the product succeed anyhow. Certainly, the campaign (904% of Kickstarter goal) already has.
While I backed this project and think its sorely needed to allow software developers access to the console platforms, I think the design of the controller was rather disappointing. I figured if they were going to create a new hardware platform it would have a more revolutionary form factor.
The controller hasn't changed since the mid-1980s. Almost all the game console makers make the same damned controllers with exception to the Wii there's been almost no innovation.
It's about time to rethink the standard controller design. I'm not talking about game-specific controllers, like the gun or joystick. I think there needs to be something more attached to actual human body movements.
I know this project was about an open game console, but I think this creates the opportunity for innovation in hardware accessories (i.e. the controller). I think we could do a lot better than the same old formula:
The nice thing about OUYA being based on Android, is that developers can either make a game for "Android" and then just tweak it to run well on OUYA and with the controller, or they can make a game "specifically" for OUYA, and then just port it to all Android devices. So either way they can get access to a huge user base for the same game, regardless of how big OUYA's base is.
Google could've had this advantage as well with Google TV, but they never cared about making Google TV a console, or better yet, a "console platform". Too bad. I'm hoping OUYA succeeds, although I still can't get myself to buy one unless it has a 2013-worthy mobile chip inside.
With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten-foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games.
This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent or want cheap, bad games. If they bothered to study what has come before,they would have looked at the difficulty of a good port from the 360 to WP7 via DNA. But either they didn't our they did and want is to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Oh--and they want to release for April 2013 and have zero developer documentation. Reminds me why these guys are seen as being on the up and up?
Because people are desperate for this to be realistic, the same way people pumped money into Diaspora, even though it was backed by a team that's never shipped product before, that all just recently left college.
I want Ouya to succeed, but I just don't see how it can happen. They are extremely aggressive both on schedule and pricing, and more than that, the team has no experience shipping consumer electronics - and hardware manufacturing is a huge, huge expertise in and of itself.
So you have a very, very inexperienced team trying to ship a consumer electronics device faster and cheaper than pretty much any other experienced manufacturer who have been doing this for decades.
I'm not sure if most backers realize quite how big of a leap this is.
I'm not sure the people behind Ouya are as inexperienced as the ones behind Diaspora. At least they somehow got Yves Behar to help with the industrial design.
This is why I think Ouya won't succeed even if it ships. In terms of game design, most games on Android are based entirely on touch input or sensor input (e.g. accelerometer), not game pad input. How many games can realistically use both control schemes effectively? I think it will turn out to be much more like how devs design around keyboard vs. gamepad for games that are both on consoles and PC, one will be preferred over another.
More fundamentally, many apps and games on the Android market don't support the extra large screen category that Google TV uses and therefore won't install. Of apps and games that do install, many do not test for a 10' experience. We've seen that with tablets it took quite some time and a lot of hardware sales to get devs interested in making tablet layouts, so I'm not sure that the base of people interested in Ouya will be enough to have devs even look at the TV experience.
So what would happen if they simply walked away with the money? Or put a million or so into a show of good-faith effort and walked away with the rest? Is there any recourse for the backers?
I am really excited about Ouya. It has the potential to become a game changing (pun intended) product. I hope they can live up to all the buzz they have generated.
This kind of money is clearly a message the world needs a product like this. Hopefully existing players (Sony, M$) will think about it a bit. I hate the fact that my PS3 is still considered the latest generation of consoles and is now more than 5 years old.
Why do you hate that fact? It's not like the PS3 is a bad console in 2012, incapable of incredible modern games. The console lifespan is lengthening as a general rule, and for good reasons.
Compared to computer games today the PS3 is incapable. Point in case: Battlefield 3, where they have to limit the game to 24 players, where PC has 64 players. And it has been like that a long time now, with many games.
That's why I like Ouya, it focuses on another market, a market where consoles generally have done really great, arcade style games. Also, with the possibility to use it as a media center is a killer feature for many people.
>> Compared to computer games today the PS3 is incapable.
It's seems like there are very two distinct paths that gamers come from: 1) arcade/old-school consoles and 2) computer FPS, RTS, MMOs.
Coming from #1 myself, I find it interesting that the majority of people from #2 really only consider their path to be "true gaming". They're the ones who are always demanding more CPU power, more memory, etc, and basically seem to ignore that there are games that are not FPS, RTS or MMOs.
Coming from #1, I don't have any complaints about underpowered consoles, and I play plenty of games running off 3D engines like Street Fighter IV, Tekken, Burnout, etc. I don't even touch FPS, RTS or MMOs. While I'm sure #1's are in the minority these days, there are still large numbers of us who buy consoles to play games that aren't best played with PCs, keyboards and mice.
The long console cycle this generation has been a great thing for consumers - we are still seeing incredible limits being pushed on both the Xbox and PS3, and has been a tremendous boon for the public, who are no longer on $400-500-every-2-years upgrade cycles.
If you really want to be at the very bleeding edge of what's possible in gaming, the PC market is alive and well. The console market is more affordable and consequently more inclusive.
> "This kind of money is clearly a message the world needs a product like this."
I doubt this. There's a [very small] market for a product like this. The power of the internet is that this [very small] demographic can come together, pool their resources, and create something they all want. This does not mean that there's a mass-market or mainstream product waiting to jump out.
Sure, it might be able to run 1080p games faster with a few more effects.
A TV console, however, doesn't need to incrementally improve as fast as a gaming computer, because the TV gamers aren't constantly upgrading to higher resolution monitors.
The console video gaming world has become, mostly, stagnant; full of sequels upon sequels. Current games are chocked full of DRM for overplayed, non-innovative titles. The market has become less about making great games that people love, and more about making executives money. It's terribly depressing and is directly responsible for me stopping my, over 25 year, love of gaming.
I, along with others, have doubts about the platform. However, I would absolutely love to see it affect some change in what the video gaming market has mostly become. I would love to see more independent developers making lots of money and pumping out cool, fun to play, games on a system that is accessible beyond the PC.