Ouya's Unsung Strength: Multiplayer For Parties

An anonymous reader writes: "Ouya, the Kickstarted, Android-based gaming console, had a much easier time selling people the idea of a mini-console than selling people on the console itself. Once people got over the excitement of seeing an indie console break into the market, they asked, 'Wait, why would I want to play Android games on my living room TV?' Almost a year has passed, and we're finally seeing an answer to that question: party gaming. It's one thing to play a console against your friends online, but when you get a bunch of people in the same room, most console games are too deep and complex to just pick up and play in a fun, semi-competitive way. The person who owns the fighting game is going to mop the floor with everyone else. Mobile games, on the other hand, are often incredibly simple, and Ouya forces every game to have a free trial, so you can easily weed out the ones that aren't good for groups. For example: 'In Hidden In Plain Sight, your character is one ninja lost in a sea of CPU-controlled ninjas with exactly the same texture. In the first few seconds, you have to walk left, right, up, down, anything that will let you understand which of the characters on the screen is yours. Once you've got that, you have to figure out your opponents. Any move that doesn't look like it's performed by the AI could give you away.'"

Comments

\Forced Demos? Not anymore....

[djsmiley]

Last I heard they don't have ot provide free demo's anymore either....

Some people think split screen is obsolete

[tepples]

I've been saying this for years: party multiplayer is historically the big strength of consoles over PCs because very few people have a gaming PC in the living room. But there is a persistent console fan on Slashdot who likes to tell me that local multiplayer with friends is obsolete. Apparently unless you're still in K-12 school, it's hard enough to coordinate schedules for a friend match with your IRL friends, let alone actually getting together for LAN or same-screen multiplayer. He claims that the vast majority of gamers are adults, and the vast majority of adult gamers have moved on to online multiplayer with pickup groups of strangers.