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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."
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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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