Ouya tops $8.5 million as Kickstarter campaign comes to a close • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by eropple » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 1:39 PM UTC

jgroome wrote: post #26

Keyframe wrote: post #18

$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.

Woah, let them actually make the thing and bring it to market before you write them off. It's grossly unfair to compare their fundraising efforts to the total sales of established console games... At this point, anyway.

Why is it unfair? They (despite claims that, honestly, just don't make a lot of sense) want to be treated seriously. This is treating them seriously. Their platform, which by the way is not a "quick port" from Android if you care about user experience, has a tiny user base compared either to consoles or phones.

I'd like to see them do well, but I'm personally not going to treat it as something special until they show that it is. So far it sounds like a shovel-ware conduit to the TV and that gets people nothing.

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

#32

Post by bonch » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 1:45 PM UTC

randomdrake wrote: post #12

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…

Console gaming has always been full of money and overplayed sequels. It hasn't changed--you have, and the nostalgia filter is taking effect.

It's naive to expect that this project will have a disruptive impact or will even happen. Their website is up at http://www.ouya.tv and has incomplete placeholder text all over the place. From the concept to the marketing, the whole thing reeks of incompetence.

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

#33

Post by potatolicious » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #30

mtgx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten-foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games. This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent o…

Because people are desperate for this to be realistic, the same way people pumped money into Diaspora, even though it was backed by a team that's never shipped product before, that all just recently left college.

I want Ouya to succeed, but I just don't see how it can happen. They are extremely aggressive both on schedule and pricing, and more than that, the team has no experience shipping consumer electronics - and hardware manufacturing is a huge, huge expertise in and of itself.

So you have a very, very inexperienced team trying to ship a consumer electronics device faster and cheaper than pretty much any other experienced manufacturer who have been doing this for decades.

I'm not sure if most backers realize quite how big of a leap this is.

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

#34

Post by bonch » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #8

I really hope this silences the naysayers. The negativity around here has gotten out of hand lately. I personally want this project to succeed.

$8.5 million isn't enough for a mass-produced game console.

You said it yourself--you want the negativity to stop because you personally want it to succeed. And that seems to be what Ouya has become, a focal point for a lot of fantasy and idealism about disrupting the market without much pragmatism or common sense to back it. Couple that with Ouya's misleading marketing, and the arguments raised by naysayers are justified.

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

#35

Post by potatolicious » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

tzaman wrote: post #4

This kind of money is clearly a message the world needs a product like this. Hopefully existing players (Sony, M$) will think about it a bit. I hate the fact that my PS3 is still considered the latest generation of consoles and is now more than 5 years old.

The long console cycle this generation has been a great thing for consumers - we are still seeing incredible limits being pushed on both the Xbox and PS3, and has been a tremendous boon for the public, who are no longer on $400-500-every-2-years upgrade cycles.

If you really want to be at the very bleeding edge of what's possible in gaming, the PC market is alive and well. The console market is more affordable and consequently more inclusive.

> "This kind of money is clearly a message the world needs a product like this."

I doubt this. There's a [very small] market for a product like this. The power of the internet is that this [very small] demographic can come together, pool their resources, and create something they all want. This does not mean that there's a mass-market or mainstream product waiting to jump out.

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

#36

Post by vectorpush » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 2:05 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #17

randomdrake wrote: post #12

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…

EA and Activision are the heroes gamers deserve. Honestly, when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.

when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.

Mmmmmm, how deliciously condescending. I wonder if that's how musicians, actors, and iOS developers feel? I make software for desktops, so I respect my target audience (of course, frivolous workstation abuse is quite common, but it's too much effort to maintain a high horse for all those edge cases)

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

#37

Post by freehunter » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 2:06 PM UTC

polshaw wrote: post #24

shadowmint wrote: post #16

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…

>47126 Ouya >7755 Ouya + Controller I thought that sounded odd. All have a controller, the second is 'limited edition brown'. As for costs.. i am guessing they will probably make an order for 100k? (They have the cash, plenty of time for more pre-orders, and surely expect to sell some after launch, and they are tiny so easy to store). At those quantities my guess for a cost breakdown; SOC; $15, nand $3, wireless radi…

Limited edition brown... Microsoft already tried that with a consumer electronics device. And that's all anyone remembers of that line of hardware. I gotta wonder, why brown?

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

#38

Post by freehunter » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 2:08 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #18

$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.

You don't need to own the market to disrupt the market. Even if they don't sell a single unit beyond the preorders, selling 60k units of a gaming device is enough to make studios take notice that there is a demand. Compare it with minor political parties, where the goal often isn't to become president but rather to force the hands of larger, established parties.

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

#39

Post by sp332 » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 2:12 PM UTC

pwny wrote: post #22

marknutter wrote: post #8

I really hope this silences the naysayers. The negativity around here has gotten out of hand lately. I personally want this project to succeed.

The "naysayers" as you say, bring up a lot of valid points that have nothing to do with the OUYA's ability to raise kickstarter money so this will probably not silence anyone. If anything, the money raised only proves the fact that over 60k people jumped in on the bandwagon of a non-existent console with no controller design that plans to ship in an almost unrealisable timeframe. I want people that try bold things to…

Even if this fails (I don't expect it to but of course it could), I'm willing to throw some money at serious research into what's so hard about making tiny $99 consoles, and how to address those problems in the next project.

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

#40

Post by sp332 » Thu, Aug 09, 2012, 2:18 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #33

eropple wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten-foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games. This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent o…

Because people are desperate for this to be realistic, the same way people pumped money into Diaspora, even though it was backed by a team that's never shipped product before, that all just recently left college. I want Ouya to succeed, but I just don't see how it can happen. They are extremely aggressive both on schedule and pricing, and more than that, the team has no experience shipping consumer electronics - and…

I'm not sure the people behind Ouya are as inexperienced as the ones behind Diaspora. At least they somehow got Yves Behar to help with the industrial design.