Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ouya Dev Consoles Ship, SDK Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the progress-as-promised dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this year, the Android-based Ouya game console project raised over nine times as much funding as they initially asked for in their Kickstarter campaign. Now, Ouya developer consoles are starting to ship, and folks on the Ouya team released a video showing what the developers should expect. As explained in the video, the console currently being shipped is by no means the final hardware, but promises to give developers everything they need to start developing apps and games for Ouya. The only surprise is that they decided to add a micro-USB port to the hardware, making it easy to hook up to a PC. The Ouya team has also released an SDK for the device (which they call the ODK — Ouya Development Kit), and have provided most of the source under the Apache 2.0 license. They wrote, 'We think we’ve got a great team of developers here at OUYA, but there’s strength in numbers and a wealth of passionate, talented people out there. We want you, the developers of the world, to work alongside us to continually improve our platform. It’s our hope that releasing a more open ODK will help foster such innovation.'"

4 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Very well done to them! by Xugumad · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, I said it couldn't be done, I was wrong. Very well done to them!

    1. Re:Very well done to them! by Xugumad · · Score: 4, Informative

      Delivering some hardware, I'll concede as not that tricky. Delivering a fairly advanced piece of kit at a very low price is another matter. Doing it on the relatively limited scale we are talking here (Kickstarter's statisics would suggest not too many over 800 kits going out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console?ref=live - add up the numbers for the $699 and above pledges) is particularly tricky.

      I can't find any off the shelf Tegra 3 boards; the nearest option is the KTT30 ( http://emea.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/embedded+motherboards/miniitx+motherboards/ktt30mitx.html ) which is unpriced and "Coming Soon!", despite a number of articles expecting it to come out in Q4 2012. The devkit board retails for 529 Euros ( http://shop.seco.com/carma-devkit.html?___store=eu_en&___from_store=eu_en ) by itself, for comparison.

      It's worth saying that the Nexus 7 hadn't been announced when I said this, and even if it had you have to wonder whether removing the touchscreen is enough to save 50% of the price, especially with Google's ability to use economies of scale to mitigate R&D costs. I would point out that the Nexus 7 is predicted to be selling around a million a month ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9645052/Google-Nexus-7-tablet-sales-approaching-1m-a-month.html ), or over 20 times the pre-orders for the Ouya. Even then the Nexus 7 is generally presumed not to be making a profit on hardware (which the Ouya will have to do).

    2. Re:Very well done to them! by ikaruga · · Score: 1, Informative

      Well guess what: I can find Tegra 3 boards available right now Japanese only
      Plus if you are a corporation you can buy chips and board design reference documentation directly from nvidia. It's not hard. Any corporation can do it.
      Also, please, don't confuse devkit boards with final commercial products. They're professional tools made for engineers in very low quantities. Dev kits are VERY expensive because of that.
      Anyway I'm leaving this obviously biased discussion. Getting tagged as troll for being realistic and exposing some facts while some guy gets tagged Informative for nothing? Just don't be surprised if the Ouya ends up in the same shelve as the "Polystation" or those chinese N64 controller/console things you see in crappy hotels all over the world.

  2. Re:why? by codewarren · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not a "dev" box in the sense that if you are a developer, you need one of these boxes. These are boxes that were specifically awarded to backers that wanted to do development. The only difference between these and the retail boxes is that these are early versions and therefore available earlier than the retail boxes. Also these are in "special edition" cases as a thank you to the devs for their support.