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

joystiq.com

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

#41

Post by praptak »

eropple wrote: post #31
jgroome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Their platform [...] has a tiny user base

A platform. That does not even exist yet. Has a tiny user base.

We have a genius here.

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

#42

Post by eropple »

praptak wrote: post #41
eropple wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Their platform [...] has a tiny user base A platform. That does not even exist yet. Has a tiny user base. We have a genius here.

That it hasn't yet released doesn't mean we don't know what we're looking at in terms of a market. 60,000 committed users is a spectacularly tiny user base.

I'd bet money (and am in fact betting my own time, which isn't entirely dissimilar) that the userbase of modern Android devices--say, from as far back as the Nexus One phone to the current Nexus 7 tablet--is so much bigger that if even one in twenty users care about games it's a more viable market.

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

#43

Post by eropple »

sp332 wrote: post #40
potatolicious wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps not as inexperienced, but Ouya is also a much harder project.

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

#44

Post by king_jester »

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…

This is why I think Ouya won't succeed even if it ships. In terms of game design, most games on Android are based entirely on touch input or sensor input (e.g. accelerometer), not game pad input. How many games can realistically use both control schemes effectively? I think it will turn out to be much more like how devs design around keyboard vs. gamepad for games that are both on consoles and PC, one will be preferred over another.

More fundamentally, many apps and games on the Android market don't support the extra large screen category that Google TV uses and therefore won't install. Of apps and games that do install, many do not test for a 10' experience. We've seen that with tablets it took quite some time and a lot of hardware sales to get devs interested in making tablet layouts, so I'm not sure that the base of people interested in Ouya will be enough to have devs even look at the TV experience.

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

#45

Post by mikecarlucci »

freehunter wrote: post #38
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.

Yeah, even if it influences the Xbox Arcade (and Sony, Nintendo competitors) then it could have an impact on the market simliar to the Steam effect.

Every July and December gamers on Steam go crazy over sales - twice yearly excitement in general that the big three consoles only get at launch and with major title releases every few years.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] »

king_jester wrote: post #44
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…

This is why I think Ouya won't succeed even if it ships. In terms of game design, most games on Android are based entirely on touch input or sensor input (e.g. accelerometer), not game pad input. How many games can realistically use both control schemes effectively? I think it will turn out to be much more like how devs design around keyboard vs. gamepad for games that are both on consoles and PC, one will be preferr…

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by illuminate »

sp332 wrote: post #39
pwny wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I'm willing to throw some money at serious research into what's so hard about making tiny $99 consoles"

Generally, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

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

#49

Post by slantyyz »

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.

Why? It's not like 4K TVs are everywhere.

Sure, it might be able to run 1080p games faster with a few more effects.

A TV console, however, doesn't need to incrementally improve as fast as a gaming computer, because the TV gamers aren't constantly upgrading to higher resolution monitors.

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

#50

Post by andybak »

pwny wrote: post #25
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.

I personally stop reading anything whenever I read "M$". Like, I literally did not read the last half of your post.

ha! Just realised I did the same thing unconsciously.
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