Is it shipping? Amazon has pre orders and the page says released in June 2013. The ouya web site has a pre order link not an order link.
I believe it is going out to the kickstarter backers or something.
If there is no attempt to sell through retail then I don’t think it will be anything much more than niche, retail is required for it to gain much market share.
The Ouya website claims Best Buy, Gamestop and Target as Retail partners in addition to amazon. All of their websites show the ouya as available for preorder. I guess we will have to wait until June to see if they can be found on retail shelves in a strip mall near you.
Ouya’s an interesting idea, and if it is automatically compatible with the vast library of android games, that’s great… but I don’t think that’s the case. It seems that android titles will need to be ported over, and that takes time and resources. From what I’ve read though, it won’t just be able to install and run any old .apk you throw at it, because its OS is different enough from android that apps aren’t going to just run on it. That’s frustrating because something niche like this would greatly benefit from the vast library of android games that could be side loaded on it without any developer involvement.
Of course they’ll need to be ported; AFAIK the Ouya uses a traditional console controller, not a touchpad like the WiiU. How many Android games use two sticks, a d-pad, and a dozen buttons for a control scheme vs. the touch screen?
Also, I have a question: Are they going to be licensing the rights to commercially release games for the Ouya like every other console, or is it genuinely ‘open source’ in that anyone can put out a game for sale on it? If the former, the only significance of being ‘open source’ would be for a mod community, which is shrinking on PC’s from what SenorBeef was saying in the PS4 thread, let alone who would make the jump to a niche dedicated hardware unit. If the latter, then the only way they’ll make money on this is hardware sales, so what kind of hardware can they offer while still undercutting the established console companies and maintaining a healthy margin for them and the retailers?
Lastly, what’s the point of continuous hardware improvements? Who does that serve? The user who now has to learn and check system requirements like a PC game? The developer that has to weigh the risk/rewards of designing for newer models to make the game more desirable vs. designing for older models to reach a larger base? Just seems like an inconvenience for everyone. If their intent is to allow people to upgrade their units, then aren’t we heading back towards PC territory?
From what I remember, the Ouya will have an official app store built into its OS, but the licensing agreement of the console allows you to do whatever you want with the OS, up to and including rolling your own and installing it over the official one, or making your own app store license-free.
Okay, so what’s to stop game publishers from rolling out their own Ouya-compatible app stores and cutting the Ouya company out entirely? If they stand to make more money that way, I’m sure they will, which brings Ouya back to the problem of having to make their money through hardware sales, or possibly things like OnLive and Netflix/Hulu/etc. But then why would they cut Ouya’s makers into the pie when they could just get some units (which are usable as dev units) and figure it out for themselves? I may be super pessimistic about this, but EA and others are trying to push alternatives to Steam just to squeeze the extra pennies out of digital download, and Ouya’s open plans just seem like a huge vulnerability to their ability to monetize whatever user base they’re able to acquire.
In the history of the console market there was only ever two major competitors at a time until Sony took an aborted joint project with Nintendo and turned it into the first Playstation, which ended up killing Sega. Then when Microsoft took a swing at it, Nintendo had to almost completely swap out their target demographics to remain a strong contender. Even being an electronics giant like Sony is no guarantee for success, witness Panasonic’s 3DO, or Microsoft’s MSX, NEC’s PC Engine/Turbografx 16, Phillips CD-i, or Apple & Bandai’s Pippin. All of these were little more than niche market endeavors that fell out of the market in a generation.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Ouya will take everyone by surprise, or maybe it won’t but it’ll produce some really interesting stuff that grabs critics attention and influences the industry. You know who first came up with a device to download games to your console using a rental model? AOL’s first incarnation as Conrol Video Corporation for the Atari 2600, it was called GameLine.
The whole “open source, practically pre-rooted” nature of Ouya is (another) one of it’s big vulnerabilities.
I fail to see why it won’t turn into “yay let’s pirate games” land.
It’s supposed to have OnLive at launch.
I wonder what the overlap between “people with good enough internet to actually use Onlive” amd “people who buy an Ouya” is.
Although that scenario would be bad for the Ouya company (there is one, right?), it is also that exact type of scenario that allows many products to take off because different companies can easily add value/differentiate themselves and make some money.
PC’s took off due to ability to make compatibles, anyone could get into the game and make some money.
Unix took off for the same reason.
Android, same thing.
Restricted and proprietary can bring in more dollars/profit if managed successfully, but open tends to spread like weeds and dominate in sheer numbers (not necessarily profits).
If you want to attract game designers, you’re going to need the profits, too.
Honestly, I thought the whole things was a colossal scam - and it still sounds like one if you read their marketing info. But they’ve exceeded my expectations just by shipping dev units. That said - I still think no one should buy one until it’s out and has a decent library. Per-ordering this is for suckers.
But if you really want an open source, big game console, forget the Ouya. Put your money on Gabe Newell and the Linux Steam Box.
I’m not sure that Ouya exists to get people to actually buy consoles. I think it exists to intentionally try to open up the market. The people involved are all part of other companies, right? I think those companies think they can make money off of the resulting spread platform.
Though I think it will be more like the Linux PDA/Gaming device. Cool for geeks who install emulators, but no one else.
Hogwash.
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Separating the “console market” from the “PC market” from the “mobile market” is a fool’s errand in 2013. Practically every company is involved in every aspect of the overall game market. If one side contracts and another side expands, that doesn’t affect Activision, EA, Sega, Capcom, and many others in any significant way.
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The belief that the console market is contracting is based on NPD data, which is full of holes and rightly ignored by many publishers. The sales of retail discs might be dropping, but Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition sold 5 million copies last year. And it’s not the only download-only release on the consoles to strike it rich.
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The Ouya also has to compete with that and with the Wii U’s very indie-friendly terms, it’s only going to be harder to attract developers (and thus, buyers).
Forget 2013 - the Wii hasn’t sold well in 3+ years. If you don’t think that having a device that brought a ton of entirely NEW people into the market ceasing to sell caused most of those people to then leave the market, I don’t really know what to tell you.
See above. The market for consoles, or even consoles and PC and dedicated handhelds, has absolutely contracted since the heyday of the Wii. Does that mean it has contracted much since 2010, say? No, probably not. But a LOT of people who weren’t into gaming before or since bought Wiis, and now they’re not buying new games for them.
The market has “contracted” back to only the “normal” growth it would have experienced without the Wii fad. Which is to say, markedly better than it was in, say, 2006. That doesn’t mean it’s now down from 2008. The “Wii High” is over. We’re back to gamers playing games on consoles. Note that this is in no way a bad thing.
The gist of what I’m trying to say here is that there is no device even attempting to fill the same niche of the Ouya as catering to the “Good enough for people who don’t really care about games” space. The Wii kindof did, but that was years ago and those people have moved on. They’re not looking for/at the Ouya.
Wait what? Compete with what, exactly?
And? The Wii sold ridiculously well in its first three years and had a slow tail off, which is not at all surprising. Its games continued to sell well, and that’s the important thing to Nintendo.
No, it hasn’t. It’s a false story created by the poor data from the NPD Group. The widespread reporting of this info is just spreading the lies further.
Again, this is wrong. The market is only contracting for retail discs. Every other section of the console market is growing because it didn’t really exist before 2008. And look at the historical stats for Wii game sales:
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/library/historical_data/pdf/consolidated_sales_e1212.pdf
They stay most consistent until last year, which is when Nintendo began shifting development dollars towards the Wii U. This happens with every Nintendo system, as you can see from the document.
Someone looking for “good enough” download games that wants to play with a controller will buy a Wii or an Xbox 360 over an Ouya seven days a week and twice on Sundays. The $100 price point is pure fantasy when you look at comparable Android-powered devices. When the Ouya launches, it will have to be priced higher than that. And that point, it’s competing with full-fledged consoles that do more and can also play disc-based games.
The download services of the PS3, 360, and Wii U. They’re all growing at a ridiculous rate and most developers will go where the money is and it ain’t with the Ouya. Especially if the system fails to sell a few million right out of the gate. Even the Wii U already has an install base of over 3 million.
Actually, according to your document, it didn’t really move games until 2009.
Sorry; I guess I’m taking too limited a view. I tend to forget that the Wii even HAS(had?) digital offerings, so my tendancy is to think about that system as a physical only device.
Even so though, none of this actually shows us what proportion of people who bought Wiis early on continued to buy games for them in the “long haul.”
I think part of the confusion here is that I’m arguing for a “contraction of the market” in terms of numbers of people, whereas you are discussing it in terms of sales and the two do not necessarily align in any meaningful way.
I don’t really know enough about android devices to say whether the $100 price point is legit or not, but it does seem out of line with the amount of power available even in older systems.
Absolutely. I think that while we may disagree on the three-degrees-removed factors and reasoning, we both are pretty convinced this thing is doomed.
One of the ways the Ouya Lady pissed me off lately was her comment at Dice about their app store -
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Who the hell is she talking about? I can’t remember ever once hearing a gamer say, “Man, if only I had an app store in my living room!”
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And the reason for this is probably because we already have app stores in our living rooms, dipshit.
In other news, Mojang just released a free version of Minecraft to run on the Raspberry Pi.
According to the document, 86 million games have been sold for the Wii. Most of them were front-loaded in the Wii’s first four years, but that’s when all the new games were released. Nowadays, there’s a heavy amount of used games in the market which people can pick up.
Plus, you can’t measure “contraction of the market” in terms of people. Nintendo doesn’t have any poll numbers of how many people have shoved their Wii in a closet. Sales are all you can go by and sales are still good.