Well, entering the console market has destroyed or crippled companies before: Atari, Sega, even a Nintendo console has been a flop (the Virtual Boy).
How can a new console be made by up-and-comers when the big three have succeeded due to their legacy or deep pockets?
By using the masses. “Ouya” (Oh-Yeah! is how I pronounce it in my head, but is actually closer to the marines “Hoo-rah!”) was launched on Kickstarter and had a goal of just under million dollars. Considering most games cost more than that to produce, what hope did this have? Apparently, a lot. It’s goal amount had been surpassed by double in the first day. It is currently sitting at over $5million, 5.25x the original amount needed.
How did this happen? A bit of word-of-mouth between large gaming news titans, grassroots efforts by the team and fans, and I like to think that gamers everywhere saw a chance for the console wars to stop being a 3-horse-race. It doesn’t hurt that indie-game programmers such as Notch (Minecraft), Jenova Chen (Flower), Adam Saltsman (Canabalt) and others gave it not only high praise but expressed interest in getting their games on it as well. Pretty much anything that can be programmed onto an Android based device will work on this hardware. It is shipping with the SDK (Source Development kit), so coders can start making games with pre-built and familiar tools. No need for a developers license, no need for developer specific hardware. Indie designers have a place they can get their game out to users.
That is one lovely hub! Reminds me of Metro.
Honestly one of the things that interests me the most would be it’s ability to stream Twitch TV. Heck, I think that someone could make it play nice with cloud-based gaming like OnLive.
Make sure to check out the kickstarter and get your own for $99 ($129 for an extra controller!):
Ouya Kickstarter.
