Murdoc

Ouya: Ooooh Yeah!

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Huh. My first thought was that this was silly and you can't come up with a console with a couple of million dollars. But apparently it's just for initial production and such... What I wonder about is how can it be that cheap when Android phones are so expensive? The phones don't need mechanical controllers and such either. Apart from that it seems enormously clever and if I had the drive to actually make games like I've wanted to have (but don't), I'd be thrilled to develop for this along with Android phones.

It seems like porting an Android game for this would only require a developer to port the controls, which would be smart anyway for the PC market.

Oh, and regarding them name-dropping SC and LoL, they way you can watch them on Twitch.tv, not play them.

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Oh hey, guys, if you have a thousand Android phones and you want to play a game on each of them, do you need to buy it separately or is there a single account that holds all the games?

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I'm with Nachimir on this one. I dunno why people fixate on the PLAY PHONE GAMES ON YOUR TV when this thing looks to be pretty powerful on its own. The big console makers are getting stogy and boring. Dealing with them from either side of the market is a chore. Something needs to light the fire under them. This goes especially for MS & Sony. I have no doubt that execs at both of them are pointing a finger and laughing at Ouya, as stupid and intransigent as they are.

All it takes is a relatively small marketshare not going to a monopoly/cartel for interesting things to happen. MS failed to strangle the internet when there was 10% of people using the olden open source Mozilla. I guess a case can be made that the PC is the true alternative to consoles and that Ouya will be competing directly with the PC not the consoles. I guess we'll have to see what the ultimate cross-section of the audience of this machine ends up being. If they can appeal to a more casual hardcodre console gaming public, and they do somehting important better than the other guys, this can end up being pretty huge.

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Hardcodre indeed.

I wasn't really interested at first, but then a colleague pledged, and then I had to as well. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with it, but it's so cheap it feels like a good deal even if it flops like a five-pound turkey in a ten-gallon pot of hot sauce. I bet a great many of the other backers feel the exact same thing.

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If they can appeal to a more casual hardcodre console gaming public, and they do somehting important better than the other guys, this can end up being pretty huge.

What?

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Im not sure about this, what is the purpose of this if we already have the pc? if the games are good enough they will rise to the top of the pile anyway so why create a console for indie?

When this console launches (£3.1 million at the time of posting) it will need a incredible infrastructure to house and filter all the games that will be available, seeing xbox live arcade, IOS and Andriod market places fail to coupe i am not hopeful for this device. But i hope they prove me wrong.

Also if this is such an amazing idea and it is so far in development why would they turn to kickstarter? how could they not get backing from a company?

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I think he meant hardcore.

I'm more confused about "casual hardcore console gaming public" as a whole, 'blix.

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I'm more confused about "casual hardcore console gaming public" as a whole, 'blix.

he was probably talking about the people who play cod and sports games and thats it, they dont read about games and just buy the huge franchises every year

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Hardcodre indeed.

Ah, poop.

By "casual hardcore console gaming public" I mean people who patronize the other console dynasties, but wouldn't be opposed to jumping ship. I say casual hardcore because someone who is truly hardcore is likely to want his Madden every year and looking exactly the same as the last Madden—or Warmen of Warhonorvalorduty 2012—or whatever it is those people play. These dudes are not easy to sway at a point before big publishers are on board (to bring their tried-and-true xtreme stupid along)—and the big publishers are not going to be on board until they have no other choice (due to the symbiotic relationships with big console manufacturers). Since I think it unlikely that Ouya can compete with consoles directly with just the indie market and its developeriat in its pocket, something else has to turn its way. Maybe I am wrong and there are hefty publishers out there that would like to fuck over the old school console makers by embracing this thing. It would have to be someone in the third or fourth place, with nothing to lose and a lot to gain by having an early adoption bonus.

And by "do something important better than the other guys", I mean insert something new and exciting and must-have into their service/promise, something that the big guys are failing to deliver. It could be that happy developers and easy development is all it needs at this point. There is not much candy that is being offered to the consumers tho.

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I'm in. I don't have a good PC to play games on. I love the idea, but let's see how it pans out.

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What I wonder about is how can it be that cheap when Android phones are so expensive?

A console doesn't need: a 3G radio chip, GPS, display or battery. The latter two, I believe, are especially expensive. It also doesn't need to be miniaturized to the same extent. I'm pretty sure that even at $100 they're making a profit, albeit a tiny one.

I'm with Nachimir on this one. I dunno why people fixate on the PLAY PHONE GAMES ON YOUR TV when this thing looks to be pretty powerful on its own. The big console makers are getting stogy and boring. Dealing with them from either side of the market is a chore. Something needs to light the fire under them. This goes especially for MS & Sony. I have no doubt that execs at both of them are pointing a finger and laughing at Ouya, as stupid and intransigent as they are.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if they skipped out on mentioning the specs and Android, people would be amazed by the hardware. As it stands (some) people are dismissing the specs as "smartphone quality" which is actually ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL. By some metrics, a modern smartphone has more graphical power than even our current gen consoles.

On the latter bit, while I agree MS & Sony are stagnating right now, there's no reason why another big company couldn't disrupt the market. After all, Ouya is basically copying the business model pioneered by Apple.

As I mentioned before, for something to disrupt the console market, it *really* needs a critical mass... I worry that *only* a big company could pull that off. Then again, maybe it'll be a slow and steady rise in market share? As you said, Firefox pulled this off.

And by "do something important better than the other guys", I mean insert something new and exciting and must-have into their service/promise, something that the big guys are failing to deliver. It could be that happy developers and easy development is all it needs at this point. There is not much candy that is being offered to the consumers tho.

There's a tonne of consumer candy, it's just a bit harder to notice. A cheap, powerful instant-on device, with downloadable games is an amazing, amazing thing. Convenience *is* a killer feature. It's what I wish Sony and Microsoft would try for their next-gen consoles, but ... *sigh* probably won't.

I wonder if the console design is final (edit: I guess it pretty much is, I should have read the text more carefully). They focus much more on the controller which, in my opinion, looks fine (albeit unusable for the color blind). Incidentially, I bought Jawbone Big Jambox a couple of weeks ago I've been really impressed by its overall quality. Hopefully, the Ouya will be as polished.

I think the controller looks ... alright. Given all the iterative design they did (judging by the kickstarter video) I'd expect something more refined. This is super frustrating because there are a million different ways to tweak a conventional controller, and they're having none of it, apparently. And yeah, given the apparent attention-to-detail, it's hard to believe they'd miss the colour blindness thing. The touch surface is a neat idea though!

(can you tell I'm an obsessive about usability and interface design yet?)

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I was guilty of outright dismissing this thing when I first read the headlines, but I've come around a bit since.

The biggest issue I see is the chicken & egg problem: devs will only flock to a platform if there are customers, and customers will only buy into a platform if there are games.

Even with Ouya's current success that's still around ... 20,000 customers. It's a tiny number compared to 60 million Xboxes, 300 million iOS devices, or who-knows-how-many PCs.

I think that the hope is that the person who would buy a $99 console off of Kickstarter is also someone who would be engaged enough to tool around with many of the games. In other words, attach rate will be very high.

Huh. My first thought was that this was silly and you can't come up with a console with a couple of million dollars. But apparently it's just for initial production and such... What I wonder about is how can it be that cheap when Android phones are so expensive? The phones don't need mechanical controllers and such either. Apart from that it seems enormously clever and if I had the drive to actually make games like I've wanted to have (but don't), I'd be thrilled to develop for this along with Android phones.

Some of the most expensive parts in a smartphone (and incidentally the parts that the Ouya doesn't need) are the display panel and battery. When I think about how Google/Asus can make the Nexus 7 for $199 with very similar specs to the Ouya, I find it not that farfetched that the Ouya can be $99 and might still make a minor profit. Also, keep in mind that Nvidia might be lowballing prices on the Tegra 3 SOC because phone manufacturers are largely using Qualcomm chips that are compatible with US LTE bands in most new phones. I don't even know of a phone sold by carriers in the US that packs Tegra 3.

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1GB of RAM seems a bit low :( Also, I'm color-blind. So it seems like a stupid investment to back this now. I'll wait for the reviews and the patch where they fix the color-blindness issues.

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Im not sure about this, what is the purpose of this if we already have the pc?

Because we never slouch on the sofa to play PC games.

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Because we never slouch on the sofa to play PC games.

Maybe I'm a massive nerd, but I don't work at home on my PC, so I have that connected to my tv so I can sit on a couch with my games and cheetos like a real human being.

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Ah, fair enough. For PC gaming, I'm generally in a chair at a desk. Console, laid out on the sofa.

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Seems unlikely that, at least out of the box, this thing will support any Android app stores but its own proprietary one. They promote it as hackable/rootable/open so presumably some other dorky subcultures will pop up around it, but it looks like their core expectation is to have basically XBLIG without XBLA and hope that the popular things filter up to the top.

I don't think I'm backing this because I am already neck-deep in a lot of industrial design/tech Kickstarters who haven't actually delivered me anything yet, but this is the sort of thing I inevitably wind up interested in and accidentally buy somehow once it's actually available.

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Here's a succinct, cynical take:

Someone's gonna have their CVs seriously bolstered, while a bunch of idealistic gamers will have an ageing smartphone in a box

Hopefully they'll use the Kickstarter funds to make some good investments, rather than just improve profits/economies of scale.

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I hope they fund some cool games then with the extra cash, even a million of that could produce a variety of cool products.

We have a few programmers here, who wants to team up and pitch them an idea? Wouldn't mind clinging on to their bandwagon to get some of that sweet, sweet cash.

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If you want cash, I think Ouya Horsebag peripheral Kickstarter is the way to go.

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