Ouya Android Console Blows Past Kickstarter Goal

mikejuk writes with a winner for quickest follow-up in a while as the Ouya console managed to raise over $2 million in a mere eight hours. From the article: "On the surface it all sounds like a really good idea. The OUYA games console is planned to be an open competitor to the likes of Xbox and PS3. It seems so good that it has been crowd funded to the tune of $1 million — but why exactly is it needed? There must be a good reason — after all the wisdom of crowds is never wrong. The simple answer seems to be freedom. The company claims that you can do what you want to the machine. A CyanogenMod port would allow you to do what you like to the OS and it wouldn't void your warranty. You can hack the hardware or software. However, it is important to note that this isn't open hardware. ... In the same way the software seems to be open and yet controlled. ... The Kickstarter page says 'When we say, "open" we mean it. We've made many decisions based on this philosophy:..' But it isn't Open Source. And yet it is so much better than the alternative. Perhaps this is a sign of just how desperate we all are to get away from the control of the big console manufacturers, that we will fund anything that sounds even slightly reasonable. The walled gardens of Apple, Sony and Microsoft no longer seem the warm and welcoming places they once did (if they ever did)" Issues not raised on yesterday's post; the console will require a significant number of binary blobs just to function, and it's really unclear whether or not it will actually be DRM free. Anyone remember Indrema?

Comments

A Kickstarter Console for Kickstarter Games!

[na1led]

Sounds like a Win-Win situation to me. Once you have the hardware, people can Kickstart projects to make software and games for it.

Scam-like points of note

[oGMo]

At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:

• Promise of "killer" opening price-point of $99.
• Promise of "every game free-to-play".
• Use of Android and other buzzwords.
• Multitude of unrelated screenshots of unrelated, unsupported, non-Android games.
• Promise of "easy rooting" (why would you need to root something if root was manufacturer-supported?)
• Lots of pseudo-appeal to the "non-mainstream".
• Release in 10 months with <$1mil budget.
• >10,000+ consoles already promised at or below price-point.

This has a lot of "too-good-to-be-true" tempered by some things to make it seem reasonable. But with the promises made, I'm not sure. "Estimated Delivery: March 2013" is awfully soon to manufacture a console with presumably no prior hardware development experience. Do they have all their contracts already lined up? Is their software already developed? Just look how long it took to get the OpenPandora out.

All of this starts making you wonder "wait, is this really legit?" I certainly can't say it's not, but it seems either naive or too good to be true.