Oh man I forgot all about that part. Pissing millions of dollars up the wall is nothing really spectacular in the game industry, its the godawful rhetoric and hubris that is killing me - "bringing games back to the TV", "the Stradivarius of controllers", "taking on the big three", "free the games", good lord just go bankrupt already. I'd rather have monopolies than this pandering horseshit.

That thing seems like it's going to do fantastic. Just what the market needs and wants.

They needed to start this a year ago.

Also, the Ouya blew its chance. People were excited, because we didn't know when we were going to get new consoles and they were exhausted from eight years of the same old shit. Then we found out consoles were coming this year, so we're going to get the new fun shit we have wanted for awhile -- and it's not this cheap half-broken scammy Ouya shit, either.

Congratulations, Ouya! You just discovered the PSN game PAIN that came out SIX YEARS AGO.

Even if new consoles weren't coming out this year, it still would have floundered. The Ouya was nothing more than a bad idea funded by a crowd of idealistic suckers.

Well, "suckers" is a strong term now. Now see, if people buy the OUYA 2, you can go ahead and call 'em suckers. For now, we're in the "fool me once" stage.

And yeah, the new consoles don't factor in. People didn't buy this system expecting Skyrim-level games. They expected something that could play android games and emulators competently on the TV, which this bloody thing simply can't do.

People didn't care about playing four year old android games on their bigscreen television and emulators were a fallback "well, if nothing else, at least we can do this on it" thing.

People didn't back this, hoping it could play Skyrim (though Julie kept trying to convince people it was somehow going to play the latest and greatest games, anyway). People backed it because they were starved for *something*. Some sort of new hardware. It was filling this temporary gadget vacuum. Nobody expected it was going to supplant a next generation of consoles -- but it filled that little need for a new gaming thing to come out and it didn't hurt that it touched on all the "free, free-to-play, crowd-funding, open-source, open-architecture" stuff alongside it.

Even if this thing were ten times cooler than it is, it wouldn't matter, because that vacuum between console releases has been filled by the certainty of a nearing pair of console releases. Now it has to truly bring something special to the table to justify the purchase (and, so far, it doesn't).

People didn't back it out of starvation. They backed it out of the promise of a $100 console and an indie utopia. Devs backed it because of crazy dreams of an indie Shangri-La. They helped fund a trek in search of El Dorado and came back with fool's gold.

Actually, a significant amount of the community comments during fundraising made it clear that they were excited because they just wanted something new. The other aspects of it were exciting, but if fundraising launched today, it wouldn't even get off the ground (not knowing what we do now).

I'm just curious when Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will be coming to the console.

............wait for it.

...............................................waaaaaaaaait for it.

Okay. It was a bad joke. I'm done.

The OUYA is pretty entertaining, though not in the way they intended.

50k on kickstarter is really hard to get these days. No one small time is going to be able to apply for this. They would have been better straight up buying a few exclusives with that $1m.

Yeah, unless you're Double Fine or a reputable developer pitching the revival of a classic franchise, you'd be lucky to make a fifth of that amount at this point.

They should take a page from the Indie Games Fund.

No kickstarters or wierd rules, just get devs to pitch games directly, like any other investor.

Outside of the PC, I think the PS4 and the Vita will be the indies' haven.

They eventually go into a two-player simultaneous mode and use a bouncy castle because why the hell not.

I love the delicious catch-22 here: if you have a game proposal that looks great enough to entire a double-digit percentage of Ouya owners to kickstart it over $50k, then presumably you could make MORE than an extra $250k (up front, not doled out like allowance) by casting a wider net and making it a standard, non-exclusive kickstarter and taking money from every schlub out there.

So why would any dev with a great game idea shoot themselves in the foot like this? Fear of failure (not generally something I have observed in kickstarter devs), or just a love of the platform?

Man, I do enjoy Kickstarter, it's just a laugh and a great chance from some odd stuff to get developed. So don't want to seem to hard on it as an avenue for funding but Ouya doing it this way just seems all about them and less about getting good games made. Can't help feeling that using Kickstarter as a promotional shop-front rather than true funding tool (the time limits here clearly preclude the funding really being about game development rather than giving money to developers to promote something Ouya has made exclusive) is only going to slowly drag the experience down.

Fuck, remember when ebay was a place to find rare stuff and bargains, not just a shop-front for people who don't want to declare tax properly. Damn, miss that.

Anyway, just rambling really as an excuse to link to the shit-starter tumbler. It's absolutely cracking to see some of the projects that failed on Kickstarter - loving the 3D tape for the iPhone :)

http://shit-starter.tumblr.com/

Nice Ouya, you'll help developers fund their games by giving them 75% of the money you promise to them after the game is released. I wonder if that would work on my current employees at my job. "Just work here for the next six months and I'll pay you then." I get the "idea" of not giving them most of the money until the game is released to make sure they actually develop the thing and then again when the exclusivity contract ends to ensure the stay exclusive. But it just looks terrible in practice.

The OUYA's only advantage is that it is cheaper than PCs or consoles, so the dev's should be aiming to provide the games other platforms have and succeed based on price alone.

Trying to attain exclusives is just going to confuse and annoy people since it defeats the point of the OUYA.

@hailinel: I'm not following. Maybe one more metaphor would clear it up for me.

Free your games by being a console exclusive on a dead platform!!!!!!

Whats an Ouya?

The Ouya continuing to prove that it's the worst with this amazing Catch-22 of an offer.

"FREE THE GAMES" Ouya is the best comedy act in gaming! They should kickstart a podcast so I can hear the insanity right from their mouths weekly, it would have segments like "What ya not been playing on THE BIG THREE" and "This week in emulators".

give all the money to Double Fine. They're hurt dawg! Don't ask them if they're alright!

I'm I the only guy that's imagining the doctor evils "one million dollars" scene ?

Use it to make, like 8 exclusive Skullgirls characters. Then maybe get the game at some point in the future.

I don't know a single person who bought an Ouya thinking they were getting anything other than a Tegra3 Android device for TV. The appeal here is that it's a set top box, not that it's a new console, regardless of how it's positioned. The only novelty here is they've got their own storefront, much like the Amazon Fire, but at least it's got expandable storage. Anyone who expected more than that is damn fool who can't read between the lines.

There was no manipulation to be seen here, people got what they wanted, a box that would play emulated games and stream media, run apps like Pandora into decent speakers. The hardware was well made aside from the controllers, which were a disappointment, but really, the only people losing here are the venture capitalists who didn't know better and sunk millions into this expecting a big payday, or the people employed by Ouya, who put their faith into the device.

I hope they're making a profit on the hardware, because that's the only profit they're likely to see short of one or two app purchases. If they're taking a loss on the hardware and gambled it all on marketplace sales, then the only ones they've been misleading are themselves.

More garbage for the garbage dumps of the future.

As the exclusivity includes the alpha and beta builds, I think there may be a fair few games that are going to be in alpha/beta for exactly 6 months and then release the full version universally on all platforms.

I, like many people, like to see things get really big quickly, crash hard, then prove themselves by rising out of the ashes. By that standard it seems OUYA is two thirds of the way there to becoming a great system.

@emgeejay: This entire game is basically just the insurance fraud missions from Saints Row 2...

"There was no manipulation to be seen here"

Are you high son?

Man, that "free the games" thing seems like some amateur business policy I would come up with. Not to mention the name of it itself. So fucking pretentious.

It's ridiculous how many people defend the Ouya simply because it has potential. Every games system has potential. The Wii U has potential, the Dreamcast has potential. Hell, kickstarter itself is funding based on potential and it's up to the person asking for money to deliver on that potential or at least prove some of it once the project is finished. Right now the Ouya is coasting, with its head just barely above water, on naive suckers still waiting for that potential to be unveiled. But so far all it has to show for itself are phone games and NES knockoffs on the emulators. Maybe that sounds shallow, but I don't want to pay for a console to play every goddamn flash/indie game in the world just like I wouldn't pay for a channel/service that only broadcasts amateur student film projects. That's what the Ouya reminds me of, bad public access TV where anyone can make any show for anyone bored enough to watch it. However if they can get Time Belt on Ouya I may reconsider my harsh stance.

@emgeejay: As terrible as that looks... I can't stop watching.

Yeah, I don't think this promotion really works for anyone, unless you were already planning on making an Ouya exclusive game via Kickstarter for more than 50k and this just happens to be a perfect storm of convoluted requirements.

So I bet that one guy is really psyched about this.

With Java as the development environment I expect to see lots of Enterprise Ready titles available really soon now...

Not sure what to think about all this but I can say that Ouya has done what a lot of other hopefuls have not done: deliver an actual product. (Sorry donators that didn't get your systems on time, at least the system does exist). I'm not intrigued by what the system does more than I am by the size of it. I frequently lug my Xbox to my weekend get-a-away and that's no fun. A small, portable system is very appealing. The dollar figures they are talking about here are pretty small for game development. Not sure what they hope to achieve but at the same time it seems like they are at least trying. In the end I'm not interested in this product unless there are games on it that I'm interested in. :) And so far I have not seen that.

As a game player, I think I'll choose to ignore this, and give my attention to a future Ouya Gamejam.

@divergence said:

How about a phone or tablet? Or better yet maybe a Vita. Seems like they're pushing hard to get as many indie games on there as possible.

I wonder if there's scope for a follow up to this.. How many developers were able to launch successful kickstarters that actually met the requirements (if any)?