Ouya Developers Share Their Experiences

RogueyWon writes "Four months after the launch of the Ouya micro-console, Gamasutra has pulled together a round up of the experiences of indie developers who have brought their games to the platform. There's both positive and negative news; developers seem to like the ease of porting to the platform, but have concerns regarding the approach that its marketplace takes. Perhaps most crucially, sales of games on the platform are far from stellar."

Comments

Steambox will murder it with steam sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Ouya would have been fine if it weren't for steambox. But I think Microsoft AND Electronic Arts are also jumping into the market. Jeeze, couldn't keep it simple right? Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft? Nope! Now, you have a lot of systems to choose from. Our team is developing for the Steam platform initially and may move on and try PS4 but unlikely. Ouya isn't even on the radar, which I can see why it should be, but.... We all own a PC so why own a Ouya? Steambox is different and the steam controller just about sells itself IMO but in the end, Ouya has almost no support, the kind of games on there is like going through a list of games during the lundum dare competitions and how many here can honestly say they knew that the Ouya console had been out for over 4-months now?

Re:Steambox will murder it with steam sales

[aiadot]

Steambox (and PC gaming) is it's own market. It has some overlap with the high-end game(PS4/XBone) consoles, but it has it's own perks, needs and expectations. Sure it technically can run anything, but gaming is much more than just running software.
Said that, the micro-console market is also it's own market, with a even more niche set of gimmicks, needs and expectations. Plus, on a pure hardware point of view, to compare a $900+ machine that needs both arms to be lifted against a $99 embedded device that fits on the palm of your hand is nonsense. Just because everybody owns a certain platform, that doesn't make support for that platform mandatory. Vision(and the guts to fight the odds and make it a reality) is more important and without it many business, including gaming business wouldn't exist. Said that, that is exactly where the problems with the OUYA begin: they don't have a vision. I could write pages pages on the problems associated with their strategy but just to expose the tip of the iceberg, marketing is nonexistent and support from firmware and network services to exclusives and first-party games is totally lacking. Consumer media devices, in particular gaming devices, just cannot live without those two things. And on top of that there is that PSVita TV, which is in the same price range, has similar hardware, but has much better software and the PlayStation brand behind it.

Why Ouya is Doomed

[drinkypoo]

I got a preorder launch Ouya. It stunk on ice. Crash! Crash! Crash! And no support for any displays with anything other than VGA, 720p, or 1080p resolution, even though there is a scaler in there, but maybe that was just my pet issue. Thing is, for LOTS of people Ouya's output looks like poop on their device because Ouya wouldn't recognize their display resolution (loads of TVs don't actually use one of these resolutions as native, and even more monitors) and then it would render internally at 1080p, but scale the output down to VGA.

The way they have differentiated themselves from other devices is to have their own store. It stinks on ice, too. Maybe they've made some major improvements since I dropped mine, but you couldn't even see your download queue, which would clear itself under some mysterious but trivially accidentally replicable conditions. But the basic fundamental problem is that now that google has announced support for gaming, and Ouya is doing things their own way, they've segmented themselves out of the market. Meanwhile, everyone else's devices will have play store game support. This one reason is enough to doom Ouya.

Sales?

[The Cat]

Sales are far from stellar?

Therefore we should immediately shut the company down, fire everyone, confiscate all Ouyas, sue them for the money they raised through crowdfunding, bulldoze the building, clear everything away but the dirt, churn saltwater into the ground, fence it off with biohazard signs and cement it over with six feet of pig iron, broken rock and mortar.

You are not allowed to be anything but a five-time Super Bowl champion. Anything less and you should be exiled forever and your name erased from the history books, you fucking loser.

Wall Street will only tolerate two companies in every market (except banks, then you can have five). If you're not one of those companies, you will always be portrayed as "not quite Ivy league" in the media until you go out of business. If you stick around long enough, one of your C-level people will be found in a hotel room fucking a chimpanzee.

Apple and Microsoft, iOS and Android, Google and Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, Wal-Mart and Target, Verizon and AT&T, Disney and Dreamworks, Mattel and Hasbro, and so forth. It's about monopoly profits. Not free markets.

This country and society have become so obsessed with sour, angry greed. It's sickening.

Re:Sales?

[RogueyWon]

Yes, damn those pesky independent game developers who really would quite like it if they could make a living by selling their games. The blood-sucking parasites who put time into making games and then sickeningly say they'd like to focus their attention on the platforms where their sales might actually let them break even. The absolute epitome of sour, angry greed, aren't they?

Congratulations - you win the "Angry Communist Fuckwit of the Week" award. On slashdot, that's quite an accolade.

Re:Doom

[bfandreas]

[OUYA's] business model is too much a hurdle for straight ports.

What did you mean by this? If you're referring to the requirement that all games have some free-to-play functionality, consider 1990s shareware games like Doom. Its first episode was free (as in beer).

I am referring directly to something a dev said in TFA. The games need a free portion. Be it a playable demo(which has seriously fallen out of fashion), a f2p model(which may also not be there to begin with) or a paywall somewhere along the line.
If you simply had designed the game as a straight-forward indie title to be sold cheaply then you won't meet the Ouya criteria by a simple port. You will have to introduce them. And given the cost/effort benefits whne you just about make a profit on a straight port you will not want to do any of the above.

The Ouya rules are highly problematic.