Ouya Forums & News

A handful of details briefly slipped out about the project earlier, but now it's here: the Ouya, an attempt not just to delve into the cutthroat world of TV game consoles but to try and shift the goal posts. At its heart, the design sounds more like a smartphone than a gaming rig with a quad-core Tegra 3 and 8GB of storage running Android 4.0. The upscale, RF wireless gamepad's standout is a built-in trackpad for playing mobile games alongside the familiar sticks and buttons — clever, though not entirely new. But with completely open hardware and software, an emphasis on free-to-play gaming and an all-important $99 price, the system is a gamble by a handful of game industry luminaries that at least a subset of players are frustrated with the status quo enough to want a real break. Read on for the full details, including a Kickstarter project as well as added details from our chat with Ouya (and Jambox) designer Yves Behar. Ouya game console 

The emphasis is on absolute openness, and that starts even with the hardware: a button on the console pops open the top and grants access to the insides. Ordinary screws keep the overall enclosure (and the controller) shut, and there's even documentation for the circuit boards. Ouya also wants the software to be truly open, as it's running Android 4.0 with an unlocked bootloader. Modifying the OS won't even void the warranty; if there's ever a version of CyanogenMod for the Ouya, it won't spoil your chances of getting a replacement unit. While the 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 onboard are primarily for Internet access and peripherals, an SD card slot and a USB 2.0 port are as much there to foster the community's development as to leave room for more storage and future peripherals.

If you're an everyday gamer, the interface will be simple, if somewhat familiar. Think of it as a stripped-down version of the Xbox 360's fall 2011 Dashboard update. That might be a positive for some would-be owners: even as Microsoft's current front-end is seemingly bent on promoting everything but games, the Ouya's creators are shooting for a games-first philosophy. About the only extra so far is built-in Twitch.tv support for streaming tournaments and other game session videos, although the Android nature of the console should allow loading third-party apps downloaded outside of a missing-by-necessity Google Play. 

It gets more interesting with development and the game sales model. Every Ouya will come with the development kit and debug console, and the early interface goes so far as to show the number of people making games, not just those playing them. Unlike the stereotypical license-heavy console model, there's no up-front fees. Meanwhile, the company not only isn't requiring a minimum price for Ouya games, it's forbidding them — every game has to start off with a free download. It's only when a developer introduces a paid strategy (in-app purchases, subscriptions and beyond) that Ouya steps in asking for a 30 percent cut of the proceeds. As core creator and former IGN veteran Julie Uhrman tells Engadget, the sense is that gamers feel”cheated” by $60 games which demand”bigger and bigger budgets” to support; a basic free-to-play requirement lowers the barrier almost completely.

The operation certainly has an optimistic, let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom view of the gaming community, but it's at least going in with some experience under its belt. We've mentioned Yves Behar, whose design chops guide both the hardware and the software, but Ouya is also taking on Xbox co-creator Ed Fries as an advisor. Investors include the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flixster (Joe Greenstein) and Jawbone (Hosain Rahman), while game developers like Minecraft maker Markus”Notch” Persson, former Interplay head (and now inXile founder) Brian Fargo, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner and a slew of well-known indie mobile game developers have thrown their weight behind the concept.

We had the chance to chat with Behar about the console before the big reveal, and we get the distinct impression that the Ouya is as much a sincere personal focus as an attempt to give that professional polish to what could have been a very frugal box. While he can see some tangential connections to Nintendo's GameCube in aiming for the”playfulness” of a very simple design, the real goal with Ouya is something that's very”openable” and embodies the philosophy towards the OS sitting inside. Behar also admits getting annoyed at the cheap-feeling, overly light gamepads of current consoles — the Ouya controller is meant to behave”like a high-end knife,” he says, with weight and responsiveness.

The software? It's”humble,” according to the designer, and lets the games take the center stage. Android doesn't have a great reputation in gaming, but that's not Behar's experience to date. It's”relatively liberating” for him with an open structure that makes it easier to implement top-level decisions regarding the interface. He can't vouch for the games themselves, which aren't in his wheelhouse.

The controller is meant to behave”like a high-end knife,” with weight and responsiveness

Compared to the Jambox, the Ouya hasn't necessarily been any harder to develop, Behar argues. Even though he obviously didn't have to design an on-screen interface for Jawbone's Bluetooth speaker, the industry veteran sees certain”unique constraints” that were in the Jambox that aren't in the Ouya console, and vice versa. Imagine the finnicky design issues that inherently define a speaker like the Jambox, such as getting a chassis that carries the sound properly, where the Ouya is almost literally hands-off outside of the controller. Behar would”for sure” tackle the Ouya, or something like it, again. Game consoles are part of a space that”hasn't been disrupted in a long time,” he informs us.

The company's main challenge, apart from convincing gamers to drop (or more likely complement) their Playstations, Wiis and Xboxes, will be getting the console to the finish line. Uhrman and crew have skipped venture capital so far and are relying on private investments as well as a $950,000 Kickstarter project to get Ouya funded. Meeting that Kickstarter goal is vital to completing the system: if they don't reach the former, they quite possibly won't achieve the latter. But if Ouya gets the all-clear from early adopters and investors, there's a chance that the TV video game industry might see its first viable fourth platform in years, at an impulse-purchase $99 price and without the usual red tape that keeps indie game developers from finding their audience. That combination may well amount to an idea worth exploring.

Now that former Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling is free from the corporate machine, he's jumping into the independent innovation scene full-force. Bowling recently donated $10,000 to the Ouya and announced a prequel to his studio's first game, Human Element, as the console's first confirmed, exclusive title.

“Could I have made this decision a year ago working on Call of Duty? Possibly not,” Bowling tells Venture Beat.”But this is what being independent, being small, and being nimble is all about. We're able to make commitments like these and take bigger risks. And what I like about Ouya and what encouraged me to commit to it was the fact that Ouya is different.”

Bowling formed Robotoki as an answer to the mainstream, public studios, and Human Element will be able to play with more formats in more creative ways than, say, popular military shooters generally do.

“What's important, what we're showing with Ouya, what we're doing on mobile, and what we're planning for 2015 is an experience that will adapt and change based on the device you're engaging with,” Bowling says.”So what we're doing on mobile is very different from what we're planning on doing with the at-home experience in 2015, and it will be very different from the episodic content that we're bringing exclusively to Ouya.”

The at-home iteration of Human Element will be a first-person survival title with heavy RPG elements. On a tablet, Human Element will focus more on strategy and resource management, sharing supplies and stats with the home game but playing as an independent experience. Human Element is episodic, and Robotoki would like to launch an installment every six months leading up to the full game's 2015 release window, but”right now, things are very early.”

Bowling draws influence for Human Element from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a cancelled BBC series called Survivors and a novel that Bowling himself started writing, The Parents' Guide to a Zombie Apocalypse.”It's rather heavy,” Bowling says. That must be the hardcover version. 

Doing a quick search on Google for “ouya” will result in a page full of news topics. Every other topic is a skeptic for the game system. Why the skepticism? It’s because the people that don’t think Ouya will come to life haven’t done much research.

The biggest dispute the skeptics make is about the length of time and the amount of money needed to fabricate the hardware. What these same skeptics don’t realize is that the technology already exists (and has for some time now) and is actively being manufactured in China as we speak. Putting together a system like Ouya has already been accomplished and there is, already at this day, full working Android consoles that are fully capable, with just a little hacking, to do exactly what the Ouya gaming system claims it will be able to do. A good example of this is the Android G-Spot [www.facebook.com/gspotpc] that is in the process of being released as we speak. This system, along with others out there, boast the same potential as the Ouya and are 100% functional with Android 4+ in a full desktop environment. These systems even run Android 3D games flawlessly with their multi-core GPU. This should quiet down some skeptics.

Another issue is with the software. Development does take time, but the most important part of the Ouya system is really just sandboxing the user into a gaming menu that selects and runs games that are already designed for Android. This is not a very big issue when you realize that Android is very easily designed to accomplish this, practically right out of the box. The only issue that may delay the process is developing the online network to allow users to easily interact with each other and download new games to the Ouya.

The last issue that comes up is fabricating the physical dimensions of the unit (and the controller). Yet another rapid development process that China just happens to be King at. The manufacturers here are quite familiar with copying existing designs and turning them into production ready replicas with their own cheap technology very quickly. Literally in a matter of days. Fabricating a concept controller and device is not complicated for these factories, especially when all of the most complicated part of the design already exists. This is just another moot point that the skeptics are screaming about.

Since we know there’s nothing technically stopping Ouya from becoming a reality next March (or potentially much sooner, since this technology exists and works) we must ask: Who are these skeptics? Who is paying these people to go around calling Ouya a scam? I venture to say the big closed source game systems are behind some, if not all of it.

According to the development team, the Ouya game system will officially be released in March 2013. In the meantime there’s going to be a developer’s release within the next few months to let programmers get a kick start on designing games for the platform. It’s definitely a long wait, and surely there will be competitive systems to come along before they actually make their release. Their popularity, however, may keep them from being stepped on by upcoming competition trying to gain traction in the Android gaming market. The fact is, it’s an open source community (Android) and this makes it difficult to hold traction unless you’re ready to release right away.

What does this mean for Ouya? It could go either way. Dedicated investors and backers (which there are many) may become disappointed when they sit back and watch competitors come along and take the spotlight. On the other  hand, it’s always possible for Ouya to have an early release due to the huge amount of support that it’s seen so far. This could get it into production much faster and afford the development side of the game console more flexibility and a lot more funding to hire more talented programmers and developers to make games come to life even faster.

Only time will tell. Either way, we’re going to have to be patient.