Ouya tops $8.5 million as Kickstarter campaign comes to a close

While everyone seems to be commenting on the impact this will have on hardware manufacturers, I'm more excited about the impact this will have on the big software distributors. I would love to see a disruption to the likes of EA.

The console video gaming world has become, mostly, stagnant; full of sequels upon sequels. Current games are chocked full of DRM for overplayed, non-innovative titles. The market has become less about making great games that people love, and more about making executives money. It's terribly depressing and is directly responsible for me stopping my, over 25 year, love of gaming.

I, along with others, have doubts about the platform. However, I would absolutely love to see it affect some change in what the video gaming market has mostly become. I would love to see more independent developers making lots of money and pumping out cool, fun to play, games on a system that is accessible beyond the PC.

The nice thing about OUYA being based on Android, is that developers can either make a game for "Android" and then just tweak it to run well on OUYA and with the controller, or they can make a game "specifically" for OUYA, and then just port it to all Android devices. So either way they can get access to a huge user base for the same game, regardless of how big OUYA's base is.

Google could've had this advantage as well with Google TV, but they never cared about making Google TV a console, or better yet, a "console platform". Too bad. I'm hoping OUYA succeeds, although I still can't get myself to buy one unless it has a 2013-worthy mobile chip inside.

47126 Ouya

7755 Ouya + Controller

2500 Ouya + 2 Controllers

826 Ouya Dev Kits

By April 2013. Good luck guys~

It's interesting to note some figures; if you assume $50 US per ouya that's $2,910,350 or 33% of the collected costs to make the hardware; double that to a guess of $100 per unit and you looking at ~68% of the collected Kickstarter.

Realistically the hardware is probably relatively cheap to manufacture in bulk, and it'll probably end up towards the $50 rather than $100 mark, especially if they decide not to upgrade to newly released hardware.

Just interesting numbers.

$8,580,682 (from 63,277 backers) - keep perspective guys. 60k - That's like one week of sales of one of the consoles in Japan only. And those aren't even pushed units numbers. Not to mention amount of money that rolls in the likes of EA titles. It's all nice and all, but nowhere near disruptive word.

Unfortunately it wouldn't be an easy task to even come close to disrupting EA. Especially in the sports genre. They own way too many exclusive contracts with leagues. And there are really no indie developers that can afford to pay rights to any sports leagues for team / player names.