Murdoc

Ouya: Ooooh Yeah!

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

Holy shit, if only it wasn't patented by Nintendo we should have totally got in on that. We could even make a game similar to enviro-bear where you drive a horse.

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Ian Fisch did a good piece on this at Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra...ete_at_work.php

I don't see the advantage of this thing over just browsing the 'Indie' section on Steam. The PC is already the perfect open-source platform. And overall it just seems really confused as a device. It's got current tablet specs, but in a box that you have to plug in to your tv. What? The whole point of tablets is that they are mobile and super easy to use. There's no wires or controllers, and you're not fixed to any one place.

A Tegra 3 is a good tablet processor now, but in a couple of years? Not so much. That's not such an issue with tablets or smartphones since people tend to ditch their old models for the latest ones every couple of years at least. But a console has a longer time frame. And when the next gen of consoles come out over the next year or so, the thing will just get lost in the crowd. I think it'll end up as one of those things like the Wonderswan Color or the GP2X that has a devoted hardcore following, but does nothing market share-wise.

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The point about the console life-cycle is pretty spot on. Even if they do end up trying to go for a once a year product update (a la cell phones), there's no precedent for throwing out your console every year to replace it with a new one. And if they don't update it, it will probably be relegated to a niche product for jailbreaking hobbyists to run old SCUMM/SNES roms on.

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I don't see the advantage of this thing over just browsing the 'Indie' section on Steam. The PC is already the perfect open-source platform. And overall it just seems really confused as a device. It's got current tablet specs, but in a box that you have to plug in to your tv. What? The whole point of tablets is that they are mobile and super easy to use. There's no wires or controllers, and you're not fixed to any one place.

Why is everyone so stuck on the tablet/phone thing? Rather than being confused as a device, I think a lot of people are confused as to what it is. It's a cheap, open console and in my estimation, that's it. By console standards, the hardware is already outdated, but how much does that really matter?

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But what is a console if not a closed-off PC? So if this is an open console... isn't it just a cheap PC? And if it's aimed at people who like to futz with code, wouldn't those same people be able to apply themselves at building an ultra low-end pc to use in exactly the same way?

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But what is a console if not a closed-off PC?

Not a closed-off PC; a standardized PC.

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Why is everyone so stuck on the tablet/phone thing? Rather than being confused as a device, I think a lot of people are confused as to what it is. It's a cheap, open console and in my estimation, that's it. By console standards, the hardware is already outdated, but how much does that really matter?

Because it's built on Android, which is seen as a mobile platform, has the specs of a cell phone and is using Tegra 3 which was designed for mobile. I get the fact that once this thing is out there that the reality of it won't be mobile so who knows what will happen, but that's the platform and technology that's been given, so given the information, I suspect a lot of the early games will be mobile ports.

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That Gamasutra article is filled with conventional wisdom and truisms. Let's wait and see how it all plays out.

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Not a closed-off PC; a standardized PC.

This is key, I think. I get that Thumbs has a lot of PC enthusiasts, and I love GOG, but seriously I do not want to play the majority of games on my desk + laptop if I can play them on my couch + tv. Plus standardization means I'm getting the same version as everyone else, I'm not constantly tweaking settings to see if I can get a better framerate, or worried about driver installs, or or or.

I agree that in practice this is going to start with a lot of mobile ports, but it also seems like company itself is distinctly targeting console gamers.

Does anyone know how the specs of this thing compare with an Xbox 360, roughly speaking? (And remember - the Wii U is also releasing this year with specs probably no better than an Xbox 360.)

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The hardware will be standardized, but if they're encouraging people to hack and tinker with this thing then the performance will cease to be. Remember that hardware is only part of the package. Games run differently on my Mac partition than on my Windows partition for example.

I really wish more PC users would experiment with plugging into a TV. It's not hard at all, thanks to HDMI, and Xbox Controllers are native to Windows. It's really not a desktop only thing. That's only a mental distinction.

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Does anyone know how the specs of this thing compare with an Xbox 360, roughly speaking? (And remember - the Wii U is also releasing this year with specs probably no better than an Xbox 360.)

I think it's probably somewhat hard to compare them, but they are approaching that kind of capability.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5762/nvidia-plots-mobile-soc-gpu-performance-surpassing-xbox-360-by-2014

Modern PC hardware is absolutely light years ahead of the 360 though, an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU is like a rocket ship compared to the Xenon in the 360. 22nm process with 1.4 billion transistors vs 90nm process with 165 million. Obviously that's a very rough indication of performance, but it gives you an idea how much things have moved on since 2005.

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I think there's some comparison between this and the Raspberry Pi: Cheap systems that are relatively easy to make stuff for. The difference between PC and Ouya is the UX and intended audience. PC may be seen by some as the perfect indie gaming platform, but not everyone who'd play indie games is into PC gaming.

The cheapness of the hardware may well lead to shorter cycles for it, but also, once developers have had a stable platform for a while, they tend to be able to get a lot more out of it than they did near launch.

Ouya and RPi are new things sitting between embedded systems and budget PCs, and as such, I don't think what's gone before gives us very good predictive models. If they fail, so be it, but even in that case they'll have been a worthwhile experiment.

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Pretty damning article by Ben Kuchera on PAR:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-reality-of-the-ouya-console-doesnt-match-the-hype-why-you-should-be-ske

So not only is there no finished hardware, no service at the moment, no controller, and no games—although we’re being asked to take their word that they can create each of those things in eight months—but focusing development costs on an incredibly risky platform with a small installed base and features that make piracy all but given makes no sense for most developers who release games you’d like to play. It’s an environment that not makes little sense for commercial development, in many ways it’s actively hostile to people hoping to create games for it.

I'd like for these guys to succeed, and I'm all for giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not cool with how disingenuously they pitched this thing. Especially the "free to play" part.

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The one thing I don't understand is the comparison to indie PC gaming. I'm as much a fan of PC gaming as anyone else here, but I can honestly barely afford it. If one of the components in my gaming PC takes a shit, I'm out of the game for at least a few months until I have the expendable income to buy a new $200 video card (and yes, I know sub-$200 GPUs exist but I want something that'll drive a 1080p display with most modern games capably).

If this thing is purporting to offer an open-source platform that works out of the box to your TV with relatively low development costs/licensing fees, it offers a substantially different budgetary reality than a gaming PC. It's as simple as that.

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Does anybody remember those portable open source consoles? They did pretty badly, or at least they stayed under the radar for most consumers.

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You mean Pandora? That's the only other open source console I know about.

Pandora still isn't available for the mass market, they haven't even finished all their preorders. And the price isn't really helping.

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No, he means the GP32 and GP2X. Those were actually released, and well before the iPhone too. Those consoles were the only legal way to play indie (or as it was called, homebrew) games on a handheld device.

I wouldn't say they did badly, I mean they were definitely successful in that they turned a profit. But yeah, compared to the overall gaming market they were a very tiny niche.

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Yeah, I mean the GP32, I bought one and couldn't do much with it. Only four official games released and I could never find anything good on the web for it back then.

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I believe the GP2X fared much better given it had a bunch of emulators (including SNES and Megadrive) available for it.

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Instead of reiterating everything I've said, I'll post a link to my article. What grinds my gears the most is that there's clearly a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. In the video, Julie Uhrman states that the system will have Minecraft. That is a lie. There are no video game deals currently. The only confirmed app at all is the TwitchTV thing. 7 months to go from 'prototype' to full product with app store and UI? That's super aggressive for pretty much any proven company.

As a toy, OUYA may be fun to play around with but really, what developer will want to create games for a console when it can be rooted as a selling point?

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oh wait.. the GP2X is based on Linux etc. So that one is open source. But the GP32 isn't.

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Where did I read that Ed Fries :fries: is also somehow behind this?

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It was in the Kickstarter I believe? Ed Fries has mad props.

I just remember that I made that smiley years ago :fries:

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