It was announced yesterday that the final hardware specifications for the OUYA have been completed. They also announced a June 4th release date for the general public, and that they have now begun shipping to the kickstarter backers. The OUYA is something that I am personally looking forward to because of the inexpensive and open nature of the system.
For those of you that haven’t been following the OUYA, let me describe what it is. At its simplest the OUYA is a kickstarted video game console, but it’s much more than that. During the 30 day campaign, it managed to raise over $8.5 mil in funding, making it the 2nd highest funded kickstarter ever. The main selling points of the console are the price tag, only $99, and the openness of the development. For starters OUYA did a really cool thing; they did away with the standard pricey and hard to come by dev gets of traditional consoles, and instead decided that every OUYA console will be a dev kit. Every OUYA can be rooted without violating any warranties, and then connected to a computer. This enables the developers to download the OUYA Development Kit software and then sideload their games and apps onto the console for testing. The other awesome feature they decided on was that every game must be free to try. Be that a 30 minute demo, the first level free, or the full game being unlocked via an in-app purchase. This is really neat because it will become more difficult for developers to hide poor games and really who hasn’t purchased a terrible game before and wished they could take it back?
OUYA will be running Android, but it’s a different aspect of android development because it’s a single uniform platform and avoids the fragmentation that developers face when creating for android platforms running on phones. This will streamline development, and if you use something like Unity for your engine then you can essentially port your game to almost every other platform.
Even though I wasn’t one of the original kickstarter backers, I will be picking up an OUYA to toy around with over the summer (and made actually develop something =D). Since OUYA is a brand new platform and a brand new concept for game development, I can’t wait to see what people do with this newfound freedom.
Learn more about the OUYA: http://www.ouya.tv/
I’ll be interested to see how the OUYA performs after release. I tend to be skeptical about the viability of an open platform game console, mostly because of the audience that a platform like this mostly appeals to. You said yourself that one of the major selling points of the console is how easily it can be rooted and customized. I can’t shake the notion that as a result software piracy will be rampant, and developers will be discouraged to release anything on the platform. For historical perspective, look at what happened to the Dreamcast after it was discovered how easy it was to hack the system wide open and play games from copies burned onto regular CD-Rs. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but when dealing with the same kind of audience that would buy a raspberry pi in order to emulate 8 and 16-bit era consoles on their TVs, the end result seems inevitable.
This is really cool. I must have missed this on Kickstarter. I am a great admirer of Kickstarter where everyday fans provide the seed money for impressive entrepreneurial endeavors.
I think OUYA fills an important market niche. There really isn’t a good open source video game console available in the market. OUYA should lower the barriers to entering the exclusive club that is the video game console industry, leading to a new age of innovation. $99 is a very impressive price point. Amateur game developers, rejoice!
I agree that fragmentation will not be a significant issue at first. However, what’s to stop other companies from making similar but slightly different Android video game consoles just like other companies currently make similar but slightly different Android phones? Maybe that’s the whole point of an open source console in the first place: the ability to mix and match and branch out to your heart’s content. I’m very interested in seeing how this niche market evolves.
OUYA’s “free to try” policy is also very interesting. I wonder whether it will work as they intend. Will game developers attempt to cheat the system by offering poor quality demos? Could developers get away with a blank screen or an advertisement instead of a real demo? Maybe the players themselves will be self-regulating and quickly identify cheating developers, just like Kickstarter users quickly identify fraudulent projects.