It has been 1 month since Ouya has been launched to the general public, and I must say I had completely forgot about it. I just happened to remember when Kevglass posted he was submiting Legends of Yore to the Ouya market.
So what happened? Was it just too overhyped? Why is nobody talking about it? Has anybody tried it yet?
I’ve heard a lot of talk about it between the podcasts I subscribe to… devs I follow on Twitter… and discussions on TIGSource. It’s been very divisive. There are some that hate it with a passion and some that love it.
The haters are mostly on it because the controller apparently sucks (something which even the pro-Ouya camp admits), and that they see it simply something that lets you play your mobile games on the TV, which is not a big deal.
Although there is the thing about TowerFall being an awesome game made for the Ouya.
Also: Emulators.
So idk, I didn’t order one and I’m not interested in it, but it seems like a wildly contested topic.
Just look at sales results of games - to be honest these are really, really low. There is just no place for console based on Android with separate market. You can get almost the same games for any Android phone.
Where are the sales figures? How is Towerfall doing?
For example there: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/162077-ouya-game-sales-figures-released-it-doesnt-look-good-for-android-console-gaming. There must be accurate info somewhere, I saw it few days ago.
Personally I love it! I ordered mine online a couple of weeks ago and arrived 4 days later.
Spent the first couple of days playing the old SNES classic from 20 years ago. Nice trip down memory lane.
Setting it up for deployment was pretty painless (apart from the usual adb-driver issues , which are always a pain).
Have been messing around with libgdx (with gdx-controllers) and got it all working pretty easily (my TV/ouya are now strategically placed in my geeky man cave next to my PC).
All in all, yeah!! Am suprised more ppl here aren’t talking about it too. For the first time ever I can write/deploy games for a Console which is fantastic. Folks seem more interested
in Java on PS4 for some reason. I write games for a hobby so all the poor sales talk doesn’t bother me in the slightest!
you need more marketing and more exclusive awesome content
but we knew this would happen D=
You can’t just launch a console and expect to both get a significant chunk of the player market, and a large pool of developers willing to take a huge risk. You need both.
A console’s strength is in the number of monthly players, not in the hardware & software.
Sure, there is a feedback loop, but Ouya doesn’t stand a chance to get mainstream.
I saw a few exclusives that I liked the look of, but if I bought the console just for some of the games I would have an XBox.
(Btw, I have a PS3. No need for more than one console)
Haven’t seen a good game out of it yet, but on the look out for 1.
Isn’t it a bit early yet to draw any conclusions? It doesn’t all have to be like an Xbox or Playstation release to eventually become a success. Just wait for a year (or a couple of years) and see if it grows. Maybe not, but I still see some potential for it.
My thinking is why do you need such a console anyway. I think in the future we will use our tablet/phone as a entertainment hub for everything. With thinks like apple-tv or chrome-cast it should be possible to play your phone games on a TV. So why should one buy an extra “console” to do stuff one could also do with a phone which one already owns. Adding controllers to a tablet in some way shouldn’t be a big problem.
Consoles are made to have a long lifecycle, with an average of nearly eight years now for the existing big 3 consoles. Ouya runs games for a platform whose hardware is in continuous turnover with a generation length of about 3 years. Without any compelling reason to develop Ouya exclusives, it’s going to go obsolete very fast. Dead within a year is my guess.
The plan is to update Ouya’s hardware yearly.
That’s going to be a PC-like console then… which invalidates the (whole?) point of having a console: one time investment for customer, long term fixed hardware for developers.
This. I like the idea of an android console( real buttons!) but it just doesn’t work. We have android tvs, and smartphones. Then there’s those bluetooth based smartphone controllers.
I’m not convinced either way yet.
Pro: Android gaming is growing and booming in sales. Google are planning to release games support in Google TV (supports android console, may hurt OUYA). Being able to play my game on the small screen and then the big screen is a great feature so far.
Con: OUYA are very small and the current crop of games isn’t great quality. They don’t have a flag ship game yet and the hardware is “odd”. Refreshing hardware yearly leads to pain.
I’m going to make my games work there for sure, yet to know what the sales are like. That said if it’s very small numbers of players but they all want to pay it might be as good as my results on other platforms that are completely saturated with people looking for free games.
Cheers,
Kev
Is the Ouya an open platform, or do you need a developer license to develop for it?
If it is truly open, they point I’d see in it is testing the waters to see if there is a market for such a console, as much of the console business nowadays seems to be driven by the corporate-controlled exclusivity deals.
Wishful thinking on my part, oh well.
I see it like Kev, hard to tell how it will turn out down the road. My biggest concern is that the team is either overwhelmed or doesn’t know what it’s doing. E.g. most of the software they released (end user UI, ODK) was pretty horrible, with a lot of newbie errors. It seems they neither got proper Android nor Unity guys on their team. The Unity SDK has been a special trainwreck from day one, and still isn’t really good (sending input events as json string, then wondering why Mono’s GC would go mad, and why there’s input lag…). Then there’s the whole “oh crap we forgot the pause button” fiasco. Everything smells amateur, and that’s not a good sign. Finally, the way they treated backers in terms of info, especially in the last few months before the retail release was really bad.
My bet is on something by Google, see Chromecast.