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Ouya CEO Talks Console's Tough First Year, and Ambitious "Ouya Everywhere" Plan
Nerval's Lobster writes "As founder and CEO of the Ouya (pronounced "OOO-yah") game company, Julie Uhrman's mission has been to lure gamers back to their living room televisions. Touch-screen gaming on a smartphone or tablet is nice, she suggests, but a big screen, coupled with the precision of a controller with buttons and analog sticks, offers the best platform for immersive, emotionally engaging experiences. Soon enough, though, you shouldn't need an Ouya console to play Ouya games. Later this week, Uhrman plans to announce 'Ouya Everywhere,' an initiative to bring Ouya games to television sets that aren't connected to Ouya hardware. As a company, Ouya remains vague about just how Ouya Everywhere will work; but in an interview with Slashdot, Uhrman provided a rough idea of what to expect: 'It could be another set-top [box],' she said. 'It could be the TV itself. There's a number of different ways that games can be played on the television, and we're actively exploring all of them.' To be clear, Ouya isn't getting out of the hardware business. The company has promised relatively frequent hardware refreshes, and already upgraded the original Ouya's controller to address early complaints. The next version of the Ouya hardware 'at a minimum will have a higher performing chipset,' she said. 'We have done a lot of work on our controller and we feel like there is even more work to do. Those are the two big things we're focused on.' But while her company builds hardware, Uhrman insists that Ouya is 'really a software company. The largest team inside Ouya is software engineers.' (Ouya has 49 employees, 19 of them engineers.) Ouya arrived with great fanfare in 2012, after a $950,000 Kickstarter campaign met its goal in just eight hours. The fundraiser ended up raising $8.6 million, and Kickstarter backers received their consoles in March 2013."
I was an original backer for the Ouya. The interface is a bit awkward, but worse, the software titles just aren't compelling. There doesn't seem to be a great reason to make an exclusive Ouya game, and anything you can find there you can get on your phone or another platform. Playing smartphone games on your TV just doesn't deliver any kind of wow factor. :(
That way they can declare it a smashing success.
As founder and CEO of the Ouya (pronounced "OOO-yah") game company, Julie Uhrman's mission has been to lure gamers back to their living room televisions.
That's going to be difficult with a silly, stupid, gay name like "Ouya." Marketing 101, Julie, you failed it.
1. Ouya
2. Ouya Everywhere
3. ???
4. Profit
Would this in any way be related to:
1. Amiga
2. Amiga Anywhere
3. ???
4. Profit
?
...that don't look and smell like shovelware. There are enough good games on the Ouya to have kept me from regretting my purchase, though. And of the games I've bought I've spent far more time playing them on the Ouya than any of the fancier games on my Nexus 7 simply because the touch screen interface is a pain in the butt, and a controller remains the best way to do this. Ouya's been fun enough for my household at least that I'll keep supporting them as long as the price remains right.
I wanted to like it because of what it supposedly stood for and meant but at the end of the day it was buggy, laggy, and had one of the worst and least responsive controllers I have ever used. Some of the games (top games too) are embarrassingly bad. Luckily I bought mine after KS and could return it, which I did.
Even if you *gave* me this PoS, I wouldn't use it. Just go bankrupt already so people stop bringing this pathetic waste up as a console.
It's named after a kind of bird that lays square eggs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's the main reason people want it. I know they can't come out and say it but have it support everything.
I just don't understand what kind of market these are going for. These retail for $129. A Wii U is $250, the PS4 retails for $399, and Steam boxes are coming soon. So who would buy one of these? And why would I want to play silly little android games on my TV? I barely want to play them on my phone.
The only use I could see would be to run emulators and play old Nintendo, Super Nintendo, etc roms on it. Of course you could just spend $20 on a gamekilp to accomplish this. And it's pretty trivial to share your phone screen with your tv these days if you wanted to play it on there.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
As founder and CEO of the Ouya (pronounced "OOO-yah")
Never understand why people start up companies with difficult-to-pronounce names.
Here's a tip: If you have to *tell* people how to pronounce the name of your company / product then you have the wrong name!
I know how Ouya is going to do Ouya Everywhere without Ouya equipment. They will broadcast from all cell towers on Channel 3. So just change to Channel 3 and you will get Ouya Everywhere. You call in to an 800# using your touch tone keypad to act as a controller.
Please stop treating us like idiots.
I got mine mostly for a xbmc media player and occasional gaming. It took a little while for them to work the kinks out with the xbmc folks, but it's pretty stable now. We play games very rarely.
I think their policy that all games must have a free trial of some kind may be hurting them, and encouraging in-app purchase games, which I can't stand. I think it would be a great market for retro-classics, but I really don't want to think about someone making Pac-Man with a trial version.
Thanks for listing the pronunciation. I've reading about these guys for nearly 2 years and I've never seen the official pronunciation before.
In my head it has always been a vaguely japanese-sounding "OH-you-uh" i've been mentally pronouncing it that way for so long I am actually having a hard time reading it as ooh-yah now. Say la vee!
I can see two reasons why major game developers might decline to port games to OUYA. One is Android's almost audio latency, which is far too high for some genres. Another is that some developers just don't want to be on the same platform as amateur hour.
When the consoles finally arrived, the full extent of the con became apparent. Despite the unthinkable financial success of the 'Kickstarter', the hardware and software of the Ouya was found to be as cheap and nasty as it could possibly be. And please, spare me the crap and lies about the 'difficulty' for a new company creating first quality consumer goods- this is hardly the fist time so-called 'enthusiasts' have entered the hardware field, and previous examples, while rarely financially successful, have delivered perfectly good hardware.
This whole project is just a way to put a maximum amount of money into Julie Uhrman's personal bank account. A woman taking advantage of nerds- who would have guessed?
Want to game on Android via a monitor?. Well, let me say this slowly...
1) get a good tablet that runs when the charger in plugged in.
2) Buy a radio linked joypad for the tablet
3) Install Joypad to 'screen touch' mapping software
OR, simply pick up Nvidia's SHIELD console/tablet/remote PC gaming device.
OR, simply pick up a gaming tablet with inbuilt joypad and connect to the monitor.
The ONLY reason to buy an Ouya is to make Julie Uhrman rich(er).
Bought an Ouya and was unable to do anything without entering a credit card number. Seriously you can not even go to the main menu.
Once they have your info purchasing full version games is one button slip away and they ask you to do it with a pop up window while playing.
Returned it same day to target.
It's basically a freaking Linux steambox without a mouse. Mice are the #1 reason PC gamers are better than console gamers. I'd rather eat a pineapple blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back than aim a gun with a joystick. THAT is why the console failed. Moronic console monkeys already have 3 console choices with better game selections. They're perfectly happy living in their own little zoo that already exists. Geekier gaming enthusiasts use REAL computers, not an Ouya.
It is a fun little console. Some of the sames, while simplistic, are quite pretty and are fun (Ballistic is a good example of this).
That said, I realize I am in the tiny minority.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Also, there are these websites called Google or Ouya you could have gone to, instead of just asking "what is Ouya? I've never heard of it!"
I think the point is that most people who have heard of OUYA are people who hang out on sites like Slashdot. It didn't get nearly enough mainstream TV coverage, for example.
'Ouya has 49 employees, 19 of them engineers'
Start there...
Kill the emulators
That would mean not allowing games to be written in Java or JavaScript. Technically, Dalvik and V8 are just as much an emulator as, say, EMUya. The only way I can think of to fully kill "emulators", in the sense of anything that allows an infringing copy of a video game for an old platform to run, would be to charge a recurring fee for the ability to test a program that you wrote on hardware that you purchased.
and show no tolerance for shovelware
People are likely to disagree on whether a particular game meets any given definition of shovelware. Which definition of shovelware are you even using?
Never understand why people start up companies with difficult-to-pronounce names.
Because someone else already registered the easy ones with some trademark office. Besides, it varies by language. A lot of English speakers initially mispronounced "Wii" as "why" instead of the correct "we". (See Luigi's Final Smash.) And I'm told the "Ekkusu-Bokkusu" from "Maikurosofuto" is a bit of a tongue-twister for a Japanese speaker.
It's incredibly hard to make a good demo of a game. You have to simultaneously provide enough content to show off the game while also not giving the player enough game so that they don't feel satisfied with just the demo.
Doom by Id Software, a first-person shooter for PC, managed it by ending the free-to-play episode "Knee-Deep in the Dead" on a cliffhanger. After this, the player could pay once to unlock "The Shores of Hell" and "Inferno", and later copies came with a fourth episode "Thy Flesh Consumed".
Demo? Nope, try a friend's copy first
How can someone do that in the Internet era, when one's "friends" likely live hundreds of miles or hundreds of kilometres away? Are you referring to Steam library lending, or do some games let players invite another player to a trial through a streaming service such as OnLive?
and the arcade and console generations did pretty well without a free to play or demo version
Arcades don't require the player to pay full price just to try the game once. They also serve refreshments and provide an immersive environment.
Every time you cold boot an OUYA console it plays a recording of the name.
OR, simply pick up a gaming tablet with inbuilt joypad and connect to the monitor.
The problem is that Android tablets with built-in discrete buttons weren't sold in stores when OUYA got funded. The closest thing was an Xperia Play, but that was priced for subsidy with a voice and data plan. Since then, plenty of gaming tablets have arrived, such as the Archos GamePad, NV's Shield, and various JXD models. But few have made it into U.S. brick-and-mortar video game stores or electronics stores or been promoted on television.
Mice are the #1 reason PC gamers are better than console gamers.
When your friends come visit your house/apartment and want to play video games with you on the TV in the living room, how many mice can you plug into one PC and have them work?
I'd rather eat a pineapple blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back than aim a gun with a joystick.
So why was Centipede one of the few arcade shooters to use a mouse-like control instead of a joystick? Not all shooters are first-person.
Doesn't the system menu have a parental control that requires a PIN entry to buy anything paid?
If you already have a phone
I already have a phone, but I haven't been able to find a lot of games for an Audiovox 8610, other than the Blackjack game and Columns clone it comes with.
Let me word it less flippantly: Some people don't have a smartphone. They would rather save money by carrying a separate prepaid dumbphone and tablet or a dumbphone and compact laptop than pay $400 a year extra for a cellular data plan. This includes, for example, parents of kids who have a phone just for arranging rides and other urgent purposes.
If games aren't worth the extra price of a PlayStation 3 over an OUYA console, then why not get a Roku box instead? At least it has all the noninteractive video streaming services.
I was an original Kickstarter backer of the Ouya. I have my "chocolate metallic" version sitting right next to my bedroom TV at the moment. Overall, I've been happy with the little box. For $99, it is probably the best "network media player" out there, with XBMC for Android installed. The fact that it plays games is simply a plus. The hardware was sufficiently powerful and of good quality at the time it launched (aside from the snafu with the first controllers). However, there are only a handful of things that keep it from being the magic device everyone spoke of, and most of them are only semi-technical decisions that could easily be reversed.
First of all, one of the biggest failings in my mind is that while it is very close to an Android device, it isn't exactly compatible with every Android app. Now most of them can be sideloaded by a technically proficient user, but I think they'd do much better of instead of having an Ouya OS that is essentially designed to disguise the "androidness" of the whole thing, it should highlight it. Offer a core AOSP experience, frequently updated (last I checked the OuyaOS is based on Android 4.1), and offer a custom, FOSS UI that is made to be navigated with the controller instead. Make it easy for people to update and use Android apps! Put installers for other app stores in the Ouya marketplace when possible, even! Let people load up Netflix for Android etc... They are paying the price in terms of content and developers coming to the platform because it is seen as an additional platform, not simply as hardware that can be tapped by those already developing on Android! They had a great idea with it being an "open" console, but it would be even more 'open' if it was completely Android compliant!
Next, they should have provided users a better installed experience from the very start. While I've gotten tons of use out of my Ouya with XBMC, I had to find the correct Android alpha build that had all the proper flags and sideload it, then launch it from the "Make" entry on the Ouya menu (because all sideloaded stuff basically requires developer-are access - not hard to acquire of course, but it does present a barrier. They could have made a separate menu for sideloaded content that was more accessible). Why wasn't it installed by default, and automatically updated? Way back in the beginning, the company stated they were working with XBMC for compatibility etc.. why wasn't it installed on every Ouya? Or at least, available in the Ouya Store to be installed with a few button presses? This was a simple change that really could have made it a much better out of the box experience for a ton of people. An Ouya with XMBC alone is a better media streamer that is more powerful and flexible than competing "WDTV" style boxes, for the same or a much lower price!
Ouya should take a page from Valve! They seems to be doing the right thing with regards to SteamOS / Steam Machines, by basing it on a fully open and compliant Linux distro, thereby making it easy for anyone who wanted to add any other repo or download any other Linux program. Ouya should react the same with with regards to Android. Make a great experience for their game/app repository, but bring in the entire Android community through compatibility. The current and future Ouya hardware could come to be known as the premiere device in its price range, in a sea of Android gumsticks and other devices, but only if they fully embrace the inclusiveness of the Android community, give users options, as well as a fantastic out of the box experience.
And what, exactly, do you expect the console maker to do about these people copying data that you don't want them to copy? Lock it down (even more) like the other crappy consoles?
Excuse my happy medium fallacy, but perhaps a console maker could just lock it down like Apple iOS. Run only Apple-approved programs out of the box, but let any adult buy into the developer program for $1047 for the first year and $99 for each additional year. (Those who already have a sufficiently recent Mac get a $649 discount.) The key difference between Apple's developer program and those offered by major console makers is that an Apple iOS developer doesn't first need to sell several games on another platform to prove "relevant video game industry experience" before being allowed to join.
$1047 for the first year [but] Those who already have a sufficiently recent Mac get a $649 discount.
the development program only cost me $99 a year, no $1047 for the first year, thats just bullshit.
The $1047 breaks down as $649 for a Mac mini (Xcode is Mac exclusive) + $299 for a device on which to test + $99 for your first year of the developer program. I will concede that I forgot to include sales tax.
I think you know what he meant and are just being stupid.
I'm trying to be precise about the scope of the proposed limits, as this scope defines what kind of software can be made to run on such a device. A developer appealing a rejection will engage in exactly the same sort of nitpicking that I display in this comment. If precise is stupid, then I'm at a loss as to why engineers go to college in the first place.
Dalvik and V8 do not emulate an actual existing physical device unlike EMUya.
It'd be helpful if you could precisely define "an actual existing physical device". Case in point: The JVM emulates a device that executes Java bytecodes in hardware, such as any ARM processor with Jazelle DBX. Dalvik has similar semantics to the JVM, although with different implementation details, and it likewise has a hardware implementation, apparently as a hardware front-end to OpenSPARC's execution units. If you really want to be "the best kind of correct" (Futurama) about banning emulators, then you'll have to ban Dalvik because "an actual existing physical device" that executes it exists.
Let me attack it a different way: What technical measures would be used to "kill the emulators"? And what definition of "shovelware" would be used?
that is under the assumption that developers do not already have access to those
Yes, I was assuming that not all developers already use a Mac as a primary computer, an iPad as a secondary computer, and an iPhone as a primary telephone. Some people have an Android phone or a feature phone, and some people have an Android tablet with Google Play, a Fire OS tablet, or no tablet. Given the discount that I mentioned for already owning a Mac, I don't see how it's so disingenuous.
but how much does it cost to develop for ouya or for android?
Both the OUYA console and Android devices with Google Play support two methods of sideloading: installing APKs on the device from unknown sources and installing APKs through a PC running Android Debug Bridge. This and Eclipse with Android SDK run on your existing Mac, Windows PC, or Linux PC. But the important part is that you don't have to buy a particular brand of computer, and prepaid phone sellers sell Android devices with Google Play for as low as $99, the same price as an OUYA console. There is a $25 fee to create a seller account on Google Play Store, but like the sign-up fee for Something Awful, that fee is not recurring.
If you have a game designed for Sony's Xperia Play phone, or if you have a game designed for an external nonalphabetic keyboard like iCade or iControlPad, then yes, an OUYA port is probably very easy. Otherwise, you'll have to either A. radically rethink your touch-based game's control scheme or B. port a controller-based game to Android. I guess a lot of companies develop a separate controller-based game and touch-based game using separate engines. The engine used for the touch-based game supports Android, but the engine used for the controller-based game might not.
And good luck getting any keysounded rhythm game (like Rock Band Unplugged/Blitz) running on something with typical Android audio latency. Even plain old platformers (like the Streemerz mission in EMUya) run into this problem because players can't use audio feedback to precisely time keypresses.
"Hacking was encouraged—users and developers were told they could root the console without voiding its warranty."
Problem was that it came out early that this wasn't a particularly "hackable" console due to some design flaws.
1) If you're doing platform-level hacking, Tegra3 is not a pleasant chipset to work with
2) It had some issues as I understand it with fastboot mode (I don't recall the exact details, but it either was extremely difficult to enter or simply didn't exist) - as a result it was very easy to brick the Ouya. The news of this drove away quite a lot of the potential enthusiast/power users.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
(How do you know)?
Have they got the support back in other (think Cyanogen) ROMs?
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