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[umiman]

Well, that seems to still be the idea.  You buy the set.  You don't buy this graphics card and this hard drive and this RAM.  You just buy "this console".  It's simple, for people who don't want to bother with understanding the specifics about computer and may not have the money to even build a good PC.  And in this economy, cheap sells.

Quite unrelated, but I know this guy who operates a travel business catered exclusively to student travelers. His modius operandi is to set up booths are universities, colleges, etc. and offer tours to exotic locations such as Thailand and Sri Lanka over summer holidays. Students, being students, are always interested but... being students, could never afford the tours. So this guy would say something very simple.

"Have you taken a student loan?"

"No."

"Well, you can take a small one to go on this once in a lifetime trip!"

And it would always work.

-------

I'm not really sure if the same rule falls for consoles but who knows. I've seen people blow their entire paycheck on a big screen TV that couldn't fit inside their apartment. And I ran into a couple once who were fighting because the woman used the last dollars of their income to buy a new bag. And at the same time the guy was holding a brand new Xbox 360 bought from Gamestop.

=|

Go figure.

[Girlinhat]

Stupid people are stupid (and let's not kid ourselves here, college kids are stupid) but a lot of people are more thrifty than that.

[eerr]

But I can rarely find PC or 360 or wii games that I want.

How will I find non-crapware on the Ouya?

[MrWiggles]

But I can rarely find PC or 360 or wii games that I want.

How will I find non-crapware on the Ouya?

Yea, lowering the bearer to entry isn't a magical wand of fucking awesome. If any other venue with zero barrier to entry has shown us, most of it will be broken poorly thought out crap.

I believe that the Ouya will have some sorta rating ability to help filter out the crap.

[Rez]

You've got an audience and you've got all the buzzwords.  "free android games not-pc" - if you wrote that on an empty cardboard box in magic marker, it'd sell.

So much this.  What is unique about this product?  What niche does it fill?  The things on their kickstarter page suggest that this product brings very little innovation. It will have worse graphics than current consoles.  It's OS is already extant, created by a 3rd party and it will probably immediately port a large number of currently available android games.   It most likely won't revolutionize gaming.

The premise that struck me,"We get it – smartphones and tablets are getting all the new titles".    Emphasis mine.  Tablets and smartphones are luxury commodities.  You don't buy a smartphone if you're freaking out about the cost of a product, unless you're buying the smartphone to fill all the roles you need computation for, in which case you're not in the market for another device with function overlap.  Is the pricing on this console competitive for the intended role of playing relatively simple games?  You can get a Wii for $150, a Xbox360 for $200, and the infamously expensive PS3 for $250.  These consoles are 6 or 7 years old, with a few hardware revisions.  The Ouya will have significantly less hardware capacity than these consoles.  I'm thinking about all these factors when I look at the Ouya and I'm thinking that it looks bad.  If you've got the money to spend on a $100 dollar console, I don't see why spending an extra 50 or 100 is the largest splurge in the world, particularly if you're already playing these games on smartphones and tablets.

The other interesting feature that I see is that they want it to be a haven for indie game developers and software/hardware hackers.  For the former, there are already many avenues by which to publish their media.  The 30/70 split interests me, if only because I don't know what kind of cut console developers usually take from indie titles they release through their xbox arcade analogues.  It bears clarification: the games on this console won't necessarily be free.   For the latter group, well, they're already hacking PSP's and current gen consoles.  This group is probably minuscule.  As GIH said, so much buzzword spam in the kickstarter page.  It's really transparent if you stand back and separate yourself from the hype for a second.  How popular is linux?  We're describing the console equivalent of linux right now.

Given the massive rate of capital accumulation and the enormous amount of press it got -THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE GAMING on about the first 10 results from google-, I'm imagining we're going to see some backlash from early adopters.  It's not very powerful and it's likely won't explode any paradigms.  That said, it is very much the sort of thing someone who only games casually might buy when it goes retail, because they'll be relatively unaware of the fact that they can find all these casual games on their computer or their sons or roommates xbox.

TBH, I can't help but think of the single game plug-ins you could get at a target or walmart when I see this.

[Girlinhat]

Nah.  Most people will get it used for $70 on the day of launch - not even kidding here, you're gonna see used items on launch day.

Of course, to be fair, the Wii went though a lot of the same criticism.  It came out cheaper than any other console with much less power, with the gimmick "this will revolutionize gaming" with the motion-controller.

And to be perfectly fair, the Wii has been one of the utmost failures of a gaming console, with only the Zelda titles being barely notable compared to their previous-gen franchise titles and a lot of gimmick games like skeet shoot and boxing.  Not to mention that for the next several years the console has been flooded with absolutely horrid titles.  Take a walk down any given electronics store and look at the Wii section.  Everything falls into a few categories: Movie/TV, old franchise, and the "Cooking Mamma" group of games that target an audience too young to actually have enough motor control to use the Wii remote.  And the "old franchise" games are usually direct ports.  Super Mario 3 Deluxe or something, same game, same graphics, new launch platform.

So yeah, I can see the OUYA becoming a cesspool of Angry Bird remakes, movie-games, and Bejeweled.  Who even played Bejeweled anymore?

[Rez]

I don't know that the Wii has been such a terrible loss for Nintendo, but it's advances with wiimote didn't really distinguish it from the the xbox360 or ps3, especially now.  I think they decided to go after a different target audience and did so with reasonable success.

What irks me most, is angry birds is a rip-off of a game (or a rip-off of a rip-off) I played on newgrounds probably 6 years ago.  Lots of these post-flash casual games are games that existed on the intertubes long before 'casual' games became a thing.

[Darkmere]

As has been said, the proof of any console is in developer support. You don't just buy a console in a vacuum; without games it's an $X paperweight. Tack on another $40-$60 to the AAA console prices per every purchase of Modern Shooter 5, possibly subscription fees for whatever services apply, etc. etc.

Now look at a platform that costs less, with guaranteed free gaming content. Depending on how much the games cost to unlock/subscribe/whatever, it could be a lot cheaper in the long-run. I'm sure there's a market for it somewhere, but I'm also pretty sure X-Box Live won't notice a sudden drop in users.

Wii sales numbers still handily squash Xbox 360 and PS3 sales. Hardly a failure, but the markets don't really overlap much, either. Wii banked on family and party games, PS3 went for something completely different.

[LoSboccacc]

Large part of android games use a touchscreen so I guess few of them will work on a tv+controller setup.

Also This thing is brutally underpowered, for all the quad core it has it's always an arm with just 1gb of ram and unspecified gpu.

It's very very near to the cheapest xbox 360 price point, too. And the Raspberry Pi next iteration may very well cover the same niche but with a proper linux (soo it will at least run open source games from the couch without requiring a touch tv and a three meters finger)

[PenguinOverlord]

Your phone, effectively, will do the same exact thing this is intended for if it's a good Android. Overall, not worth it.

[lordcooper]

Large part of android games use a touchscreen so I guess few of them will work on a tv+controller setup.

Also This thing is brutally underpowered, for all the quad core it has it's always an arm with just 1gb of ram and unspecified gpu.

It's very very near to the cheapest xbox 360 price point, too. And the Raspberry Pi next iteration may very well cover the same niche but with a proper linux (soo it will at least run open source games from the couch without requiring a touch tv and a three meters finger)

Erm, try clicking the link.  The controller will have a touchpad on it.

[Matz05]

Ah... then why not sell a smartphone-to-TV adapter? I'm sure you could make one for 50 cents each. 10 dollars, including licencing fees for whatever propietary standard TVs and smartphones use these days.

[Shadowlord]

Looks to me like this:

• Possibly more powerful than current-gen consoles, has twice as much RAM as the XBox 360. Not sure how powerful Tegra 3 is in real terms compared to the stuff in the XBox 360 and PS3, but what really matters is how it compares to next-gen consoles and computers.
• Sounds dramatically underpowered compared to current computers or next-gen consoles.
• Who stole the hard drive?
• Why is there only one USB port? So you have to buy a USB hub or decide whether you want a keyboard, a mouse, or a hard drive plugged in?

"Developers can wave farewell to the roadblocks of bringing a console game to market. Anyone can make a game: every OUYA console is a dev kit. No need to purchase a license or an expensive SDK. It's built on Android, so developers already know how it works. "
This is great, aside from assuming that all game developers and aspiring game developers know or want to develop for Android or in java, and the no "licensing fees, retail fees, and publishing fees" sounds nice. However the hardware leaves me extremely skeptical (and I'd wonder about AAA games and many others likely having to license an engine of some kind anyways).

Microsoft has that "You can develop for the XBox 360 in C# using XNA!" thing going for them.

Unity also allows using C# for scripts, and building games for the XBox 360, PS3, Wii, and iOS, and Android... although not all features work on iOS and Android, and you have to be an authorized developer for any of those to build a Unity game for them, I believe.

[alway]

How the hell did this even get funded?!?

It's a $100 smart phone you plug into your TV. But without the phone features. People don't buy phones to play angry birds.

As a developer, why the hell would I make games for this? It's trying to compete using a console-like business plan: good games = more user base = more good games. But here's the thing: the whole reason the mobile games are taking off is because it isn't tied to that very limiting console business plan! Mobile games are successful because people are buying the phones for their internet and phone capabilities by the hundreds of millions, and thus there is already a massive user base. This has neither the massive user base of the mobile market nor the top-of-the-line game experience (with exclusive titles) of consoles and PCs.

At best, the system will get nothing but ported games simply because the user base isn't there. In the amount of time it would take for a user base to grow to sufficient levels, the terrible hardware specs would be so far out of date as to be comparable to trying to sell a Gameboy Color as a viable gaming platform today. At worst, developers won't even bother porting things or working out deals with the content distribution system, and the system will be left entirely void of use. So far as I can tell, it's just a machine for showing hipster-cred; because when it comes to actual use, it's intentionally crippling itself when compared to other systems.

Another really important thing: they claim to be easy for developers. However, they are requiring some form of free version of the game. Now, I dunno about you, but importing a few libraries to develop on another system is a hell of a lot easier than, say, making an entirely new build of the game for free-to-play. PC has no licence costs. Mobile markets have no licence costs. Even console licence costs would probably be lower than the cost of, say, making an entirely new build of the game for free-to-play. And those would all have larger markets than this hipster-machine.

It also seems to be playing up the 'play at your tv!!!!' thing. Which isn't good; that's absolutely terrible. One of the other reasons mobile gaming is successful is because it can be mobile. Being a highly niche, non-mobile, single-purpose device is NOT an asset in an era of general-purpose, mobile devices with massive pre-existing markets. You can make shit-on-a-brick cheaper than a sandwich, but I would rather eat the price than the shit-on-a-brick.

[LoSboccacc]

Large part of android games use a touchscreen so I guess few of them will work on a tv+controller setup.

Also This thing is brutally underpowered, for all the quad core it has it's always an arm with just 1gb of ram and unspecified gpu.

It's very very near to the cheapest xbox 360 price point, too. And the Raspberry Pi next iteration may very well cover the same niche but with a proper linux (soo it will at least run open source games from the couch without requiring a touch tv and a three meters finger)

Erm, try clicking the link.  The controller will have a touchpad on it.

Which is very bad for absolute input unless it has a display too mirroring the tv