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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?
That's got to be a serious contender for the record of fastest funded project on Kickstarter in the category of nearly a million dollars... But anyway, I hope this means we'll get to see what they come up with - a 99 dollar console is just about in the range of 'sure, I'll bite - see what it's like' in terms of risk to the consumer.
This is the equivalent of hooking a tablet to your television. You'll have access to the same Android games that every smartphone and tablet has, assuming that the app even supports a controller.
Where is the innovation here? The fact that it is an open platform? This isn't a consumer product either, it is for hackers and developers who make up 1% of the consumer market share for video games (who are also the idiots who funded this project). I don't see anything spectacular coming from this, except maybe a good marketing campaign with all the money they've raised.
Scanning the title I thought they got a Kickstarter project for creating an Android command terminal app that would allow you to run standard GNU/BSD tools like grep, find and sort without rooting the phone. Would be really nice to have if you can use an external keyboard with it.
I read a big blog post the other day going on about why this was a scam, is it still a scam or has our thinking changed?
I find it hard to believe you're a game developer.
>after all the wisdom of crowds is never wrong
Really? Or was that sarcasm?
Here are the problems I foresee:
1) They're either selling the hardware at cost or taking a loss at $99. Big console manufacturers make it back on $60 games. It will be really tough to make it off 30% of 99c games.
2) Storage, 8 GB(minus OS space) is really low, and you don't want to be downloading from the cloud all the time. XBox gets away with a 4GB model because it has a DVD drive. Throw in a SD card slot atleast or a cheap SSD.
3) Hardware: The hardware seems woefully inadequate. Tegra 3 is okay for now but in 2013 when they actually launch? Also, it's not a good thing to upgrade hardware even every year because that will fragment the games, so that hardware at launch is a very important baseline.
4) And the last big thing: PATENTS. The big players and patent trolls will be all over this company by the time it even sees minimal success. With the controller looking very similar to the existing ones, expect a huge patent attack.
Anyway, nice to see an underdog coming up in the console games, but it's hard to understand why Google can't make something like this. They already have Google TV and they release something like the Nexus Q at $299?
I threw my $99 behind the project. Hopefully it turns out to be a fun system. That's a hell of a lot less than I paid for either my phone or my Playstation3. I don't expect to be playing Uncharted on the thing at that price... I just expect to play something comparable to what I have on my phone. My kids play iPod games for hours on end, so this console will see use one way or the other.
Big game companies don't want consoles being easier to hack for easier game piracy. This may shy away some of the more serious game makers. On the other hand, MMO, RTS and other such games can finally find themselves in the console world.
I think people like the convenience of consoles, mainly. Turn them on, and bang, you're playing in a moment. The locked-in hardware means that everything you run on it will be compatible, or updates will be auto-installed.
However, we've gotten sick of the console-makers' sense that somehow they OWN us as customers, and can reach further and further into our lives to control the console experience downstream.
If I mod my console, that's MY BUSINESS, not the hardware-sellers. I don't think anyone would object to the developers saying "ok then that voids your warranty" - that's fair. But when they push updates that then (pretty obviously deliberately) break modding, brick systems, and contrive to rope us back into their definition of what we should be doing with their systems, we resist and look for alternatives.
Which is why I hope this works, but its main impact will be in policy, not product. It's a vote against the proprietary walled-garden mentality of the big hardware makers. PERHAPS they'll see that a console player just wants to play the damned games, not become part of the dev's 'family'.
-Styopa
Hey guys, have you ever heard of this open platform where you can install whatever software you want, plug a controller into it, and even attach it to a television? It's called a laptop.
Are you trolling or stupid?
All my android devices are rooted, I have pirated exactly 0 applications or videos or movies.
Why would anyone need an excuse to own their own devices?
Is for C64 and Apple ][ emulators.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Next up: An Android Powered DVR with CableCard support.
Hey I can dream, right?
$2 million all for the price of a flashy presentation. Let me say this again, they just made $2 million in DONATIONS with 0 requirements to actually bring this device to market. Show of hands, how many people remember the Phantom console?
And people wonder where their money goes and why they are in so much debt...
I agree that the console market needs to have more open source contenders, but guess what, they HAVE contenders! There are plenty of open source / open hardware solutions that you can even build yourself! These solutions come with a variety of software options including Ubuntu and Android. Heck there are even a few portable handheld open consoles available. The difference is that these are actual devices for sale and not a list of shiny specs with no solid strategy for being profitable, especially at the $99 price point they mention.
One of these days I need to make a flashy shiny kickstarter presentation with a lot of loaded promises just so that I can cash out and retire early...
Yes, a brand new project with little to no details, no actual work done so far, no actual design just a theory ...
While I agree that it could just be a scam, they actually claim to have a working prototype.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
News from the world: all commercial, closed, heavily secured, drm-laden game consoles currently available on the market have already been deeply pirated, and therefore users already don't "need" to pay for a game.
So, what are your thoughts on PC gaming?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Sounds like a Win-Win situation to me. Once you have the hardware, people can Kickstart projects to make software and games for it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
This is sort of a recurring theme in a lot of Kickstarter projects -- why did this particular project need to go to Kickstarter?
If you look at their pitch video, clearly no expense was spared getting the Ouya to its current point. Fancy office space, dozens of designers/developers, Macs for everyone, etc. Somebody has pumped serious cash into this venture. So why do they have to beg common people for a mere million bucks to get this thing off the ground? Were they just going to give up if they didn't get the money? Somehow I doubt that.
I've never seen anyone raise that particular question about this project. They obviously have some deep-pocketed investors, so why do they have to beg for money from a bunch of regular Joes who will certainly feel the financial impact if this thing never comes to fruition?
I posted as AC by mistake... but yes I am an independent game developer (not hard to find these days with mobile devices).
And I am not trolling or stupid... I just need to Google my games to know they are available for free and being copied. I have data from my transactions and number of what countries buy or download my games. I can tell that although Americans buy a lot but this is not true for other countries. For instance, one of my games has sold almost less copies than there are download sites with cracked versions of it. The fact some people don't do it don't mean it won't be the main attractive for most people (specially outside us)
Citation granted
As a backer, I'm not really sure if i'm interested in purchasing a product like this. Yet I'm very eager to see what happens with it. Despite fragmentation, android as a platform is somewhat of a standard, and I'm sure that, after seeing this, other manufacturers will attempt to launch similar and compatible devices. So, at the end of the day, if just an interesting enough library of console-style games is created for Android, this could as well be a revolution.
It's an underpowered box that will be laughed out of the market because It's so underpowered and stupid that any Phone will be better than this box by the time it's released
Any phone, even the bargain-basement $100 phones that Virgin Mobile and other prepaid carriers sell? And would such a phone include a Bluetooth gamepad, or would games still rely on thumb swipe gestures?
Why you would want to play a press button X now to make the movie continue game I am not sure.
Yet people play a press buttons X, Y, and Z in the displayed sequence to make the song continue game. Such games go by the titles Parappa, Dance Dance Revolution, Amplitude, and Rock Band.
You could at least try to fake you were replying to raydobb's post. Replying to the first poster just for the sake of placement is extremely lame IMHO.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
So what?
I mean that seriously, you are not losing money, it is no different than if someone did not buy the game. I know that sounds harsh, but the reality is every minute you spend worrying about people like that is one less you can spend getting actual customers. To an indie dev, I would suggest making a version to post on such websites. Change some models/sprites/backgrounds to pirates or zombies or something, and leave out the ending. This way it will at least be harder for people to find the pirated full version and you will get free advertising.
Spend more time making it worth me buying and less time worrying about what broke folks do. Some people will never give you their money, don't worry about what you can't change. Worry about getting those of us who might give you money to actually do so.
Please also tell me what game it is so I can go check it out.
From their FAQ:
"We have begun work on the user interface and software."
Begun? Wouldn't that come first? I mean, if you're going to run into legal issues, that's where it would be, right?
At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:
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.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Well... you cna get it and judge for yourself
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.po.pequenosvelozesttr
There is a free demo version with you don't have a dollar
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.po.pequenosvelozesttrdemo
Given the lack of fighting games on PC apart from the major-label Street Fighter IV and the indie MUGEN, and the complete absence of party games in the style of Mario Party, I'd say major labels have found their own reasons to avoid the PC for some genres.
I like the concept, I see a couple of potential flaws though =\
My biggest thing is yeah I play the $.99 games on my phone or tablet when I'm away from any 'real' gaming devices (i.e. my desktop, or my laptop). I don't know that you could really draw me to dedicate a TV to playing angry birds... to me the $.99 games are secondary to whatever it is I am actually doing (watching tv, working, reading slashdot, taking a bathroom break =D ). If the quality of game we get is along those lines, it wouldn't be that enticing because I already have *that* device like 10 times over. Alternatively if there are some free to play games on like on steam (I'm looking at you Tribes) that are well made, and could be played to their fullest without paying a cent - it could be worth it. Certainly if steam jumped on board with this, it could be big for both sides.
Another issue that I have is the open-ness itself. If the device is that open, then you'll have people choosing their flavor of non-standard OS for the device, games being released not being compatible with the non-standard OS. Game developers not wanting to put any time and effort into testing on anything other than the base OS. Game developers stop making games for it altogether due to the amount of support issues from people using the device with a non-standard OS and it fades into the sunset. On the other hand, you could have a system that is so easy to make awesome games for that the big dogs might feel a bit of a hit. This could really be a game changer. You would end up seeing the other consoles (already intrenched, with internet based game delivery already possible) releasing games with the same structure and the entire game marketplace shifts from large up front purchases, to recurring purchases over an infinitely variable amount of time.
Time will tell, all in all I am glad they got the funding they needed and I'd probably buy one when it came out because lets face it, it just plain looks awesome.
I'm sure you've heard this before, being on slashdot and all. You can't assume that all pirated copies are lost sales. (And the less popular corollary that piracy does cause some people to stiff you rather than pay)
You can argue the above until you're blue in the face, but I suggest you forget all that. When somebody pirates your game you've actually got a very valuable asset that another industry screams for. Eyes and attention. Brand recognition. You /can/ capitalize on that, but you have to be clever.
I don't know if this has been tried, but I think it's a great idea. I say, insert some code in to your game that activates when the game knows it's been pirated. (Which should be trival with a little call-home routine? Its how you track your piracy rates anyway, right?) What does this code do? Show ads. That is all. Your pirated game becomes the de-facto ad supported version automatically. You may even already have an ad supported version on an app store, but you're letting the pirates believe they're getting a free ride anyway. They get the psychological validation of saving some money and you make your ad revenue, while they distribute your wares for free.
I obviously agree with that... but achieving it is harder than it sounds. I was just moaning and ranting on my first post anyway.
I posted the game link on another reply
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2972173&cid=40615803
I can tell that although Americans buy a lot but this is not true for other countries.
How much of this is because a lot of countries didn't have paid apps for the first year or so that Android Market was in operation? Lack of support for paid apps in some countries has driven a lot of Android application developers to either A. derive revenue from ads instead of payments, especially after the success of Rovio's Angry Birds, or B. handle their own payment processing for unknown-source APK downloads.
That's my current situation. I'm THIS close to quitting so I will be able to sleep 8 hours per day again. I have to work on the job that pay my bills at day.
It took three years for the PlayStation 3 console to be pirated, and I seem to remember that that didn't start until after Sony had already removed Other OS support. The Ouya console, on the other hand, comes with its devkit.
So they beat you until you stopped being able to work?
Or was your game not good enough to get actual sales. Remember than the cost of entry to pirate is infinitely lower than to buy.
Not all games support controllers, but 'higher end' ones do. I have three in particular - Max Payne, Shadowgun, and Dead Trigger. The graphics are pretty good - not much below current-gen consoles, actually. So long as more and more games support gamepads like that, I can see a niche for the Ouya.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I just saw that. Not my style but looks pretty nice. I like the lack of crazy permissions.
I think you might want to try a less crowded field. There are tons of those style of racing games, some that have very good art that no single developer could ever compete with.
As an example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polarbit.RecklessRacing
Your game may be 100 times better, but these guys have the shiny. In a crowded market the shiny counts for a lot.
Games that actually use that Tegra3 have to have textures and other art assets that take up space. I have 4 of the big 'Yay Tegra3' games for Android - Max Payne Mobile, Shadowgun THD, Dead Trigger, and Dark Meadow. Every one of them had a lengthy post-'install' download of around 1 GB each. That'd fill up over half that 8GB space.
I'd figure an SD card slot, or even an external USB drive connection, would be necessary in practice. Or you'd be limited to smaller games and one or two big ones, period.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
One of these days someone is going to post a project that generates millions and then not offer a product to market, I have a feeling this might be one of them.
Sure, someone might be able to slap together an android powered prototype and ship it to project contributors to appease them that "something" was accomplished. Of course the box probably won't work well or as proposed.
But at what point does a kickstarter project be declared fraud? What are the ramifications of taking millions from contributors and not being able to deliver a product? What about not delivering a product for the price-point suggested, or not having the features expected, or any number of many many things that could change from the original proposal? What about delivering a product that nobody wants or doesn't generate revenue? People are buying into the idea of a $99 android game console, what happens when its shipped as a $299 under powerd crap-box, if its even delivered at al?
There are, or course, no ramifications which is why crowdfunding is probably one of the dumbest ways to waste money offered on the web (right up their with buying Carbon offsets). Straight from kickstarter.com "Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project." There is just a bunch of wordage about "responsibility" and "open communication with backers", but I mean, come on, once your credit card has been charged forget about any active involvement or due diligence into expecting your money is being responsibly utilized. There is ZERO creator accountability on Kickstarter, just a lot of hopeful promises and finger crossing. Not saying all Kickstarter projects are scams, but I am sure there are more then a few in progress at the moment.
I do, however, applaud anyone that can find a way to separate stupid people from their money. This is capitalism in its purest form. I just think the bubble is going to burst when some high-profile project generates millions and does not deliver, which is going to happen eventually or is already in progress.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
On the other hand, replying to the reply of the first poster is super cool.
Once the once potentially great console starts to gather momentum , gathering the interests of investors, larger game studios and so forth. Once money is on the cards the ideals of a completely open and hackable console will slowly start to become less important.
Somebody has to make money from this and to stand a real chance of success it has to have the backing of major game studios. The console will need some killer apps , maybe even exclusive titles. Without it this will end up just a hackers dream. I imagine the first things that will get ported will be emulators such as Mame, WinUAE etc. In the end it will just be a glorified GP32x / Pandora that plugs into your TV with a few shitty ports of TuxRacer and a ton of casual games like Super Angry Tortoise Catapault Brothers!
Still I would love to be proven wrong and we have a very real competitor to the big boys!
N...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You /can/ capitalize on that, but you have to be clever.
Wrong. Sometimes a tiny, tiny minority are able to capitalize on it out of sheer luck. Cleverness has nothing to do with it.
The fact is, lots of people are directly harmed by piracy (me included). The general response I get from people is that I deserve to lose everything and that they deserve to steal everything and that I'm the one who broke some imaginary contract in their head. Basically, as many studies have constently proven, most pirates steal because they feel they are self entitled for having done absolutely nothing other than steal. And so the Entitled Generation was born.
Someone who is willing to pirate a game (or music, or video), isn't going to go pay for one simply because it's good. Do you think people pirate crappy games, but go out and pay retail for the good ones? Do you think people pirate Episodes I-III and VI, but buy the DVD of Episodes IV and V?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
so, will you be switching development to non-hackable consoles such as the latest versions of Gameboy and PSP?
Way to miss the point.
Good games are bought by people unlikely to pirate, and pirated by those likely to do that. Bad games are not bought by those who are unlikely to pirate and pirated by those who are likely to do that.
In college I knew people who pirated only to have huge collections of stuff they never used. We called them digital packrats.
If Nintendo didn't require you to be an A tier developer with blockbuster games already in your stable
Think of it from Nintendo's point of view. In 1983, shelves were filled with low-budget me-too games that clearly fulfilled Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 revelation about 90 percent of works in a genre or medium. This almost killed the living room video game industry in 1983. If you haven't proven that you can finish a commercial game above the 50th percentile of quality, why should Nintendo let you see its trade secrets?
they have geared their developer's licensing to poach developers from other consoles.
Why do you think only games for other consoles count as "relevant video game industry experience" (as warioworld.com puts it), not commercial games for PC or mobile?
Perhaps as the market matures, places like Metacritic and game magazines will review and rate indie titles on such systems as this more frequently
Hence Valve's recent announcement of crowdsourcing the Steam game approval process. But as for Metacritic and the "game magazines" that it draws from, how will reliable gaming publications have the time to review even a substantial fraction of indie productions? I can see how a publication swamped with games to review would just rely on the same genetic heuristic that the console makers have been committing for nearly the past three decades.
I would love to... but there is a lot of complications for a small developer to work on those platforms. My main point though, is I don't feel attracted by a hackable console as a developer. A mix of freedom to port to any device (like Steam has) and a closed controlled environment (like a Playstatino 3... sort of) would be ideal for me.
They'll have the numbers but if it's practically impossible to find the good ones in the pile among the junk
Hence the requirement of a free demo, so that players can download a game and rate it without having to spend anything. It's almost like the old days of cartridge based systems, where one would often rent games to see if they were any good before buying them.
Is there a good excuse for a "hackable" console device other than being able to do piracy of multiple types of content?
Being able to use it for purposes other than the original intended one? Look at the original Xbox: Hacking it got us XBMC, one of the better living room PC setups of the time. That later evolved to Roku.
Seriously, this attitude is pure horseshit. When shit is available for free, it isn't shocking that most people would rather get it for free than pay for it, regardless of how worth it the title is.
It's possible to connect a laptop to a television. But statistically nobody does this outside the geek demographic of sites like Slashdot. The advantages of Ouya are that 1. it's promoted by its manufacturer as designed for connection to a TV and 2. it includes a controller at no additional charge.
All games will be free to play. Developers will make money through in-game purchases, subcriptions, unlocks, etc, like TF2 and League of Legends. This is all on the Kickstarter page.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I mean that seriously, you are not losing money
Except you don't know that. For one, actually making the shit has costs associated with it. I know the pirate lobby likes to keep saying how "digital distribution doesn't cost anything!" but that's ignoring the fact that there are costs with creating it in the first place. Further, the game could have some online component, in which case the pirates are costing him in bandwidth.
Yes, but those big companies are usually able to weather the piracy rates much better. They generally have bigger fanbases, as people know what they're getting into. An indie dev has no such luxury.
but why exactly is it needed?
Why not?
but afaict to do so you have to
1: void your warranty
2: pay some shady guy to mod your box
3: risk getting your box banned from online gaming services
It is possible to pirate modern console games but the barrier is much higher than with open platforms.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
They're not begging. They're selling it.
Pledge $99 or more:
GET AN OUYA: console and controller. Guarantee we will have one available for you, before it gets to stores. Plus the rewards above. We're figuring out how many we can make! (We have to ask you to add $20 for shipping outside the U.S.) Please add $30 if you want a second controller.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
My main point though, is I don't feel attracted by a hackable console as a developer.
Then, if you don't mind my asking, why did you start on Android in the first place? It's not like it's a new feature of the OS or anything.
A few things:
First, people who pirate your games or whatever are not stealing anything. You obviously allowed people access to the work, they are just not using it as you intended. You may not like this behavior, and you would be perfectly justified in not liking it, AND it is likely illegal, but it doesn't mean they are thieves. Sometimes people do things I don't like, and I wish they would pay me instead, but they rarely do so (sorry, that's a little facetious...).
Also, I find it strangely ironic that you are raging about people who pirate your stuff having a sense of entitlement, when you are arguing from a position of entitlement yourself. You realize that you are claiming to be entitled to financial reward from the release of some kind of media? If you choose to release a game, book, movie, song, or whatever you run the risk that people will make copies, and give it to other people. You are entitled to nothing from this. Nobody operating any sort of business is entitled to succeed. Many (most) business ventures fail miserably, often despite hard work. Instead of whining about being harmed by people stealing from you, suck it up. Do what you can, but it may just not work out. If it doesn't work out, then congratulations, you are one of the majority!
http://xkcd.com/484/
Frankly I have more fun playing a NDS game on an emulator than playing a PC game, and it was much easier to set them up too!
They should have released some of the Gameboy classics as re-figured as one-off emu+plus game combo .exe or something.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
The app I gave as an example was not from a DRM loving big label.
He is just in a crowded space.
I predict all of them will support this via OnLive or similar service. That is the model those folks want to get to anyway.
Because in my opinion it's the easiest start point for an indie developer. There is a 25 dollars fee and it is easy to publish and sell stuff. I admit I had this idea that people would mostly get cracked games because they were expensive. This fell to the ground since my games cost only 1 dollar and were cracked anyway. The only thing keeping me making these games today is because I really like making them... If I depended on it to buy food I would have starved a long time ago.
I am no pirate, I am just a realist.
Piracy is not a sale, they will not pay, ignore them. Any effort against them only costs you real customers.The costs associated with creation are unchanged by piracy. There is no incremental cost.
For an indie dev, piracy should be exploited as I suggested as marketing. Poison the pirates' well with modified versions of your own game, make sure that version is found on every such site.
You should certainly prevent them from costing you money in your online service. That is very easy to do.
Again, I am not a pirate, I have not pirated anything for more than a decade. I won't lie, kids do stupid shit. I am however concerned with all the wasted money, effort and time that folks spend on this issue instead of investing those in improving their application to attract actual buyers.
Nonsense. I buy plenty of games even though I know perfectly well how to get every last one of them for free. If you were right, there would be no gaming industry at all, because no one would pay for any games, ever (or so few would pay that the industry would collapse.)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
It took months after the Other OS incident, but that itself was years after the November 2006 launch of the console.
I hate my stuff getting pirated as much as anybody, but DRM does very little to stop it. All it effectively is is something to tell people when they're stealing.
It's Freemium for me from here on out. I hate freemium, but I hate getting ripped off more. If I weren't a one man shop, barely scraping by, I'd be more generous.
Hate that freemium, always-connected games are taking over the marketplace? Thank a pirate. I don't know about the big studios, but for a lot of us little guys, curtailing piracy is a matter of survival, and always-connected games are the only effective solution. This requires a backend, which requires a steady revenue stream to keep it running.
It's going to be interesting to see how it works out as pirates have access to fewer and fewer titles. Will they start spending money on free to play games, or will they just drop out? Will I make more or less money?
Either way, they're not getting my best goodies for free anymore, and there's satisfaction in that.
What about replying to the reply of the ... aww, nuts, skip it.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
About 1-2: it's true, but at least where I live, games are so expensive that even if you got your console bricked, its price would be repaid by pirating four or five games.
3: that would apply to an open console, too. You'll need some kind of account to play online games and it probably won't be usable by two consoles at the same time.
Piracy is a matter of cost and convenience. Piracy is always free, but sometimes it's incredibly inconvenient. Sometimes it's even risky. Purchasing should always have the advantage in quality and convenience. So in the long run, content providers should always win. But sometimes they screw it up and make piracy attractive. And it's often easier for content producers to blame piracy for their woes than to address the problem of piracy offering a better experience.
If purchasing the game is much easier than pirating and the cost isn't obscene, everyone, except for those who get a thrill out of "being bad" and pirating, will purchase the game.
If pirating the game is easier than purchasing it (e.g., cd-keys, DRM, online installation verification, limited copies in retail stores)--and it's free, well, few would pay for it.
For example, Steam is wildly successful because it's so, so easy, prices are good, and sales are frequent. You never have to worry about finding the game at your local retailer, prices are always competitive, and you can play your game wherever and on whatever computer you want at any time. The music industry has been wildly unsuccessful combating piracy because piracy is easy and gives you DRM-free music, whereas purchasing has often been expensive and/or gives you DRM-laden music. The anime industry is also one where in many cases fansubs are higher quality than the official product, and piracy is easy. Which would you choose: 1.) paying $20 for 4 episodes with a lower quality translation whitewashed for kids and old, unformatted DVD subtitles, or 2.) freely pirating an entire season with better-formatted subtitles, sing-a-long, bilingual, animated intro lyrics, a higher quality translation written by devoted fans, and cultural notes for those times when it is necessary?
Then you're basically asking for an ecosystem that doesn't exist. Either create it yourself, wait for someone who will, or deal with what you've got now.
If you think people won't be able to pirate your games just because they're on a "closed controlled environment," though, you're smoking something.
How much has your game really been pirated? I noticed it costs $1. Are you just assuming it's being pirated because hardly anyone is buying it? I know of no game that I'd waste time pirating if it was $1. Cheaper just to buy it. (Same with music these days. Why pirate when it's so cheap and convenient?)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
How could they NOT have a working prototype? Its jsut Tegra 3 and software. Ive been thinking about a device like this since forever, its not rocket science.
Good-bye
That is the old way of thinking. Compatibility by Exclusion. You should be thinking compatibility, portability, etc. The days of one OS running the show are OVER.
Good-bye
I must say my whole point again is not that I want something that indeed will never exist... it's that game developers in general won't feel attracted by this console (unless for promoting stuff with ad full apps).
To see my games are being indeed downloaded for free just click on statistics on the video below to see how many hits the video got from cracked app pages. There is a few thousands already (the game currently is on the 100 - 150 downloads on google play). This is obviously only the people who cared to play the video and only from sites that put the video link... (could be that people played and not downloaded too... but even if you consider only 50% of the people downloading it is still a much higher number than the people who bought the game)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DnWI-7NMLw
By your logic, no one should be buying PC games since it's an open platform and there's no built-in DRM... yet they sell plenty.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
A PC is much more interesting and has a much more interesting user base than a hackable 99 dollar box.
Not DRM, just streaming video instead of giving you the game.
Still sucks though.
Can games made for OUYA be distributed outside the OUYA store for users to play on non-rooted consoles, or is it more like iOS and XBox Live Arcade which -- unmodified, out of the box -- will only run games that are sold through the platform's official store? According to the FAQ on their Kickstarter page, it looks like it's going to be the latter:
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
It's sad that in America if your goal is anything other than getting fabulously weatlhy, your motives are instantly questioned and you're labelled a scammer.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Actually, if that's the case, he needs to charge for the online component, and then the pirates are just helping with distribution.
Mind the Gap
Since this device is based on the Tegra 3 SoC, I doubt it will be much of a departure from the Tegra 3 dev kits, making the hardware design a cinch.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I understand your point. I do. There's a reason the big, comparatively wealthy gaming companies all prefer to use Digital Rights Management. Some people who pirate games will not pay for a game under any circumstances, but others will pay if they have no other means to get the game. If that wasn't the case, the $50 PC game market would have imploded years ago because an awful lot of the people paying $50 for a game would pirate it if they could.
Unfortunately, there is no right solution to this. Requiring your customers to let you install or use previously installed rights management software on their devices is wrong, period. I should not have to put up with spyware, adware, or anything proprietary and beyond my control on my devices. So either you the developer get screwed by piracy or the customers have their rights infringed. Since you need to pay your rent, I understand why you might prefer the former.
I'll only buy a game console if the DRM is light or completely absent, so if the Ouya is truly open it is right up my alley. But as much as we at Slashdot love to rant and rage, we're the minority - most people will buy consoles with DRM without thinking twice. I know porting an application is a non-trivial thing, but you may want to consider porting your games to iOS, or Steam, or similar - or see if you can get in on the next Humble Indie Bundle or Indie Royale (better to get 5% of a million dollar Humble Indie Bundle sale at $0.03 per actual copy sold than 90% of $1000 in total sales on the Android Market).
On the other hand, maybe the Ouya people are going to put some kind of DRM in their game store. You might want to check into that - it could be your solution.
Good luck. Your game looks nice, nice work.
It's not DRM because it can actually work - and by work, I mean finally achieve the producers' goal of taking away all the power from the gamer.
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The first is a red herring. The costs exist regardless of any piracy. A pirate doesn't "cost" any more than any other non-buyer, which is 0.
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So what?
I mean that seriously, you are not losing money,
Seriously he is losing money to piracy. Yes many people who pirate games, music, books wouldn't have spent the money (although they may have spent the money elsewhere. But a lot of people would have spent the money, if the game wasn't free.
Yes, you can't stop the pirates, any more than you can really stop people from stealing car steroes. But you shouldn't be condoning it either.
Whilst it's openness may not be perfect it would love this approach to get a foot in the door of the otherwise draconian console market. Realistically for this project to get anywhere near what people are hoping, it will be it needs to be a Dreamcast level success. To match the Dreamcast this Kickstarter would really need 300,000 backers (it is just reaching 30,000 so who knows).
Unless there's any kind of online component, in which case the dev has to pay for bandwidth costs for the pirate.
Which is why I specified "the first", which means I was referring to the development costs.
But it's not true that it applies to any kinds of online component. In fact, I'd say it doesn't apply to most online games; specifically, those which either:
1. Provide on-going revenue, either with service subscriptions or microtransactions (see WoW or TF2 hats)
2. Rely on the users to provide the servers (e.g. any Call of Duty up to MW2)
The other games are usually doomed from the start, because after the big sale period dies down, the servers are a pure liability anyway and there's a big pressure to cut them off, even without piracy.
Personally, I avoid them completely. I can still play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or UT99 online to this day, yet friends of mine who bought MGS3 were screwed after just a year.
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