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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."
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Steambox and Ouya address fairly different markets. Steambox approaches the console niche from above, Ouya from below. I think those little TV games boxes will be safe from competitors for a while unless Sony gets serious about its Vita TV. Of course that's ignoring the issue of whether there's enough of a market or development community for these devices in the first place.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
I can't imagine anything less interesting to me that playing those games on my television.
Have you imagined sitting in front of your TV with it turned off?
With your kids, and hitting them?
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If a Kickstarter is very sucessful, does it not mean that the majority of people interested in the project has already committed money to it? Thus, huge Kickstarter successes are less likely to do well financially after it is launched?
Valve already has PC gamers on board. The Steambox isn't for them, by and large.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.
http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?3193-Let-OUYA-know-we-NEED-to-be-able-to-boot-to-recovery
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability. Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
I installed XBMC on mine, and been using it exclusively as a HTPC.
Been thinking about installing MAME or something similar though, but so far I haven't played a single game on mine.
Oh and by the way, even with good ventilation, it gets hot!
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Steambox is a very interesting thing. At the moment I have my PC hooked up to my TV and play in Steam Big Picture mode. But having my PC in my living room is not sustainable because it makes too much noise. Funnily I never thought so in my old flat where I kept it in my study. If they manage to keep the noise down with reasonably powerful results and they manage to keep the price down by skipping the Windows license then the Steam Box is very much in the market.
If you play a lot of games then a console is the very last thing you want to buy. I just got an alert for Mass Effect 1 and 2 being on sale for less than a pack of cigarettes. You will never get games as cheaply on a console.
Which takes us straight to the Ouya. On the cheap games front the Ouya competes with the PC(SteamBox) and loses out on every aspect. Except on price. I will keep buying Ouyas because frankly it is a great idea with two major flaws: it takes a lot more experience to build a proper controller and their business model is too much a hurdle for straight ports.
So yes, I agree with the GP.
20 minutes into the future
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.
I recently bought an Ouya myself. Having looked at the system for a bit its not really THAT bad, but you have to go into it knowing the limitations. It's not an Xbox or a Playstation. Its basically a toy for tablet level games but just gives you a way to play them with a controller (which despite the explosion of tablet/mobile games is still a better way to play many things).
The only real games I've used mine for have been Final Fantasy III and emulating consoles. It has worked well for that.
Considering that my original motivation was that I wanted another XBMC box and setting up another Raspberry Pi would have been around $75 (with case, remote, power, etc), I figured that the extra $25 to have a basic "console" wasn't bad. I certainly won't be tossing out my "real" game systems any time soon though.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You can buy games that cheaply on a console right now, in the form of physical disks. If (as is expected) they start to go all-digital, similar pricing will come across.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Just to give a second oppinion I can say that I really enjoy my Ouya that I bought in August. I payed $149 (one extra controller) and honestly almost felt it was repaid after the first weekend of playing games and having a blast with my girlfriend (Hidden in plain sight, Bomb Squad, Suction co-op). And now that I've discovered XBMC and spend countless hours playing Nimble Quest and Knightmare Tower the cost is completely written off.
I really like the simpleness of most Ouya games. I just don't have the time to get into some long complicated game any more, so most new AAA titles don't attract me. But my previous console was a Super Nintendo, so my reference frame might be different from many hard-core gamers :) In contrast to many other commenters here I also like the fact that it has its own store. That means that all the games I find has been tuned to work for the hardware. If it used the Google Android app-store I imagine the titles that worked well would drown in all the games that didn't make any sense to run without a touch screen.
I have experienced some un-responsiveness with the controllers which went away after a reboot, but none of the other problems you describe. Maybe many of the issues that the Kickstarter supporters experienced in the beginning has been fixed providing me with a generally more positive experience. Also I just feel completely amazed at the power you can pack in such small item and for such a small cost. The same goes for the games, I mean, most of them are cheaper than my lunch!
So, thank you very much for supporting the Ouya on Kickstarter, allowing people like me to enjoy it. I'm sorry it didn't live up to your expectations. For me it really doesn't matter if the Ouya is "doomed" or not, I'm enjoying mine plenty anyway.