What you've heard
Open source, open license, moddable; these are meaningless words that I've been told are very good. Finally, we have a gaming system that puts all of these things into one package of buzzword awesomeness. With 10,000 developers already signed up and the second most successful Kickstarter in history, it’s time for the big three of gaming consoles to start running! Very soon Ouya is in your base, killing your market share.
Except
The Ouya seems like a great idea as long as you keep people talking about what it is; a gaming console that is easy for devs to modify, as a (mostly) open source OS, and is going to allow for more open publishing and distribution than either Google Play or the Apple app store. It becomes a lot less cool when you realize all of these things solve problems that don’t really exist. Is there really a base of developers somewhere who would be putting out fantastic games if not for the constricted publishing environments imposed by the current systems? The 10,000 developers who have signed on include mostly big names of established independent developers who are already doing just fine releasing games on the locked, un-rootable systems of today. It’s right about this point you realize that when the Ouya’s sales pitch says it will free developers from the things holding them back in the modern distribution model, they are talking about things like quality control and accountability. We already have free to play developers trying to scam people out of money with deceptive in-game purchases (often aimed at children), and it’s Google and Apple who have stepped up to prevent this type of behavior, going as far as to offer refunds to people fooled by the worst offenders. Ouya will have none of that, and have already stated they want to attract the free to play market.
So what’s the deal?
The Android gaming market is HUGE, and everyone wants a piece of it. Being able to work around Google Play is a godsend for smaller developers who want to make a $1000 budget game and try and sell it to 2000 people, and that type of market might be desirable on a local level. Hell, as a LARP owner the Ouya would be a great medium for releasing a LARP based game! It simply doesn't have the wide appeal everyone thinks it does, and will not have any impact on the current game market. It allows people to build a new type of game, but unfortunately that type of game is the low budget shitty game with no quality control.
But the real nail in the Ouya coffin is what it can’t do. It’s a gaming console running Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) on a 1.7 GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A9, or, put in non-technical terms, it’s a cell phone from early last year that you can’t take with you. Or use as a phone. Ars Technica and Slashdot have already had a crack it reviewing it and it’s not a good story; my Galaxy Note 2 phone outperforms this gaming console by almost 100% in some benchmarks and it’s slow by even the most generous standards when compared to $150 to $250 tablets. At $100 for the system and $50 for additional controllers, this system seems to attempt to fill the need people have for sitting at home playing the cheap games they bought on their phones...on the TV. Hands up everyone in the room that has that need?
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