Gaming Console Ouya Raises $1 Million on Kickstarter in 8 Hours

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/gaming-console-ouya-raises-1-million-on-kickstarter-in-8-hours/259664/

by drubio • 14 years ago

80 121 14 years ago

theatlantic.com

endianswap• 14 years ago

Current thread on OUYA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223627

I'm not surprised they raised a million dollars, but I think they're surprised since they had to bump up the availability of the 99 dollar pledge level a few hours ago when they ran out.

blahedo• 14 years ago

And surely they'll have to bump it again or introduce a new level; they're already back down to 800 remaining (currently out of 10,000), still with 29 days to go. The $99 pledge level wasn't even in there initially; I think they were expecting the bulk of their pledges to come from low-end pledges where people reserve a username. They're also out of etched boxes ($225 level) and even most of the developer specials ($700) are gone.

Danieru• 14 years ago

Considering that at first they had just enough slots to reach their goal I think they are managing the launch to maximize unit sales and hype.

What I am surprised about is that they did not raise the price above $99 with the second top up (20,000 @ $99). Thus $99 must not be a below cost loss leader. My guess is that they will offer as many $99 units as possible. Their balancing act is to offer an unbounded number of units while maintaining the air of exclusivity. Offer too many units at one time and people might thing they are missing their sales target.

With this much hype and sales they should have decent leverage with developers. I got the impression that a few developers they talked to were on the fence. Their first update could be interesting.

Exciting times eh?

AshleysBrain• 14 years ago

Try refreshing the Kickstarter page a few times. Jumps up $100-500 each refresh. Insane!

mindstab5• 14 years ago

It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and calling them "amateurs".

What is up with that? HN is supposed to be about the cutting edge and it just dumped all over this project which then went on to get $1million in 8 hours. I suggest a sizable part of the HN "doesn't get it". And this saddens and bugs me. I come to HN for the news and also very much the commentary. But suddenly there seems like this big anti android pro iOS bias and a bunch of curmudgeons running things.

This device looks really cool, has amazing potential, is near free for a console and clearly has amazing demand but HN put out the hate. What gives?

This isn't the first time I've noticed this. Recently several neat android related announcements have gotten some strongly negative commentary here and even none announcement iOS articles have gotten glowing praise. :(

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and calling them "amateurs".

I think there's a significant proportion of the HN userbase that responds to things like Kickstarter funding with indignation, because it neatly circumvents the VC funding process that so many of us have suffered through. It's almost a "How dare they raise so much money without jumping through hoops like I did?"

mindstab5• 14 years ago

So people find a better way to get money and the old hardened crowd here gets cranky? How fast we grow into curmudgeons. I need to find a new "hacker news" that still has the spirit and would say "holy cow, congrats, amazing work, and we should look to see if we can exploit that next time too". So much for the spirit of the entrepreneur and hacker. Seems old school corporate crankiness. :(

trotsky3• 14 years ago

I intentionally avoided chiming in on that thread so I didn't sound like a sourpuss. I'm not sure if it's jealousy alone, but I feel like it's bit improper for people to be moving those kind of volumes on products so early in their design cycle. So many things can and do go wrong especially with what's a reasonably complex software/hardware ecosystem - it sounded like they hadn't really started a lot of it yet. Projects are hard to bring in on time even when you're pretty experienced with the platform etc. I'm not saying they're not going to be successful, it's just from a statistical point of view I would expect some of these high profile long lead time deals to implode.

Which isn't to say I object to them as obviously the interest is there, but I'm not sure I'd feel ok taking millions in orders before I had at least done a tiny engineering sample run, had a set of testable software etc. Because even the people who are pros have to go back to the drawing board sometimes.

Anyway I do agree with you - I feel a bit of resentment about some of these big kickstarter deals, but I try to keep it to myself. Ones that are simpler or are really just using it as a pre-order tool don't bug me at all.

prayag3• 14 years ago

This has been bothering me as well. HN has gotten into a habit of shitting all over new ideas, innovations and technology start-ups. It's not just android or iOS, nor is it about taking VC money or not. It's about trying to do something different and showing promise. If you do that a large part of HN community will just shit all over you.

This is very different from the community a few years or even a few months ago.

These people are trying to disrupt a market that solely belongs to big players (MS, Sony and Nintendo), shouldn't we be happy that a smaller player is trying to enter the tough market. That deserves some applause and a pat on the back, doesn't it?

mindstab5• 14 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly and that's why I was so shocked and sad and dismayed to read the comment thread here. It seems like the spirit of HN is drying up and dying. :(

Community growth is hard to manage and HN has done amazingly well avoiding previous pitfalls like falling to trolls but now it looks like something new and more subtle is befalling it. :/

johnrob3• 14 years ago

I've noticed this trend as well. It's hard to miss for anyone who's lurked here longer than two years.

That said, I think I know what the culprit is: money. Check out the headlines on the front page. How many titles contain a '$'? Yesterday I saw some big numbers: 100M for github, 20M for stripe, 10M for someone else, plus kayak IPO numbers. Today we've got kickstarter.

As a community, we've become obsessed with money. Bootstrapping revenue, angel rounds, VC funding, acquisitions, IPOs, croudfunding, etc. When people focus on money they get upset. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but the quick version is that it's human nature and basically unavoidable.

So, in short: we think too much about money, and as a consequence we're grumpy.

Tsagadai• 14 years ago

I think there is an increasing number of people here who have either stopped thinking big or never started. Disruption is becoming just a business meme like synergy and teamwork. Some people fear change and while the community here seems to embrace change there are many who are really, really scared by the idea of their world shifting.

Kickstarter is a great place to raise some money for an interesting project. Get a couple of like minded hackers on side, write a decent proposal and demo a product and you too can get a cool million. I'm sure that is terrifying for a lot of people here. They are afraid because its a threat to their dreams of making it or the way they 'made it'. They are afraid because they don't have any ideas. They are afraid because they have a choice.

I love the little guys who are trying to upset the big players. I genuinely adore some of the players out there at the moment who are thinking big and trying to do or make wholly new things. It's fantastic to see that sort of creativity finally getting attention and funding. But I don't think everyone shares my enthusiasm.

I think some people are just pretending and playing at being the type of person they wish they were.

msie6• 14 years ago

I hope they succeed because I hate the closed systems of the big three. I would love to develop/ship some software without having to jump through the many hoops that the big three put up. That said I am skeptical that they will build a machine that I would fall in love with. There are so many problems with what's listed:

- not enough RAM

- not enough secondary storage

- no DVD/Blu Ray drive

- powerful enough video card?

- controller button layout not suitable for colour-blind people

Add those items and bump up the price $100 and I'm in. I want this to succeed and they don't have many chances to get it right.

mtgx7• 14 years ago

What makes you say there isn't enough RAM? Are you saying it from a "future-proof" point of view? You're only going to run one game at a time, and I don't think Android games can even use more than 50 MB of RAM or something (just like they can't on iOS). The graphics are good enough for this price. We're talking indie games here, not AAA games.

mindstab5• 14 years ago

The RAM argument amuses me since it has twice the RAM of the xbox360 and the PS3. And a dedicated console has different RAM requirements than a generic OS box. Also games have forever been making due with what RAM is available.

The DVD/blueray player IMHO misses the point. It's an internet download game console. It's now an all-in-one media box, it's one (cheap!) thing. Get a separate blueray/dvd player if you need (cheap too)

Ok I too wonder a bit about the storage but that mostly irrelevant if they have an SD card slot

Powerful enough video card? Well, it's playing android games and the tegra is the best android video card out there right now. I'm not sure you can just drop an off the shelf nvidia/ati card into and android/ARM setup and have it go with out some expensive driver development somewhere. The tegra already works, is ready to go, and gives the current best performance of the market and games they are targeting.

Controller: I'm pretty sure at over half a year out they can tweak that. And usually as with every other console there's a decent market in 3rd party controllers.

I think the $100 price point is one of it's best features and doubling it would be terrible.

patrickaljord5• 14 years ago

It's supposed to be an open hackable plateform so you can root it easily and even hack the hardware. So that mean you can add RAM, a more powerful video card, use your own controller. Even if you're not a hacker, it comes with a USB port so you can plug-in your usb stick or your 1Tb external hard drive if you need a secondary storage. Also, regular people don't need all that extra stuff or know they exist.

ThomPete5• 14 years ago

It's a two edged sword. When you have this many smart people in a community a lot of the right questions are being asked.

The same people however are often not in any position to judge the business potential of something simply.

My own rule is to try and abide the three rules of feedback.

1. Don't assume other people are idiots 2. Given the right premises everything is possible 3. Give critique either with a suggestion to solve it or as a question that can be answered.

TylerE• 14 years ago

Of course, at the same time, given the history of phantomware in the console sector, I'll be a lot more impressed when the actually ship good, functional hardware.

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

I'm fine with people pointing out the potential pitfalls. That's how I think about things myself.

The problem I have with the other thread is that the very first thing you read is "Looks like amateur hour."

That's a problem of tone, not content, and it's something that can be fixed at zero loss to the value of the site. By us, the users.

Discourage negative tone, encourage actual thinking.

6ren• 14 years ago

For quite a while, HN has been dominated by negative comments in general, many of which are also simply ignorant. Occasionally, you'll see an old-time comment, full of relevant facts (and generally with some balance, since it's usually hard to be 100% biased when using facts).

Therefore, I mostly avoid the comments on HN these days. The stories themselves can sometimes be interesting, but now I'm finding ol' slashdot is better for that.

My suggestion to fix this is to focus on stories that are "intellectually stimulating" and dropping topical news altogether (or having them in a separate frontpage).

"Industry News and Gossip" is part of the problem, I believe. It doesn't promote discussions that are intellectually stimulating, and it doesn't attract people who value intellectual stimulation. There's a thousand other news sites - it's never what made HN valuable.

Sadly, HN has that pesky "news" in its name, despite the guidelines seeming to not be about news: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

wavephorm• 14 years ago

  HN has been dominated by negative comments in general

No the problem is the comment voting system on HN is completely pointless, and doesn't allow good comments to rise to the surface. So you end up reading all good/positive and all bad/negative comments as if they are the same.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. There are some unanswered questions, things like "Hmm that seems awfully inexpensive given where you are starting from." So let's assume nVidia gives them a great deal and they pay $10/CPU, plus memory, plus flash, plus assembly. We're looking at $65 or so to build it. Consider something like the Beaglebone which uses a cheaper CPU and its costs.

Now historically game console manufacturers sold consoles near (or below!) cost and then made up the difference selling licensees as part of the games, made famous by Nintendo early on, the 'custom game cart' that they had to make for you. But these guys want to keep games low cost (even free) so that's a challenge.

Then there is the OS, sure its a port of Android but it isn't Android. It has their own stuff in it, and like all complex software packages Android is full of bugs of varying complexity, and being a bit 'off axis' as they are they will probably wander into less tested code. So they no doubt have at least one and probably two or three full time Android kernel/system engineers. So that's like a .5M$/yr burdened cost, more so if they do point optimizations to improve their user experience.

We've got the Founder(s) (presumably the designer is on contract and they can jettison those ongoing costs once they are done) so say they run a really tight ship, maybe 10 people? So maybe they have a $6M/yr burn rate. How much do they have to sell to cover those costs? What numbers did they promise their suppliers? Lets be generous and say they can sell 100K units the first year. That would require clearing $60/unit to break even. They currently have about 13K backers, so for everyone one they sell on Kickstarter they will need another 10 to sell somewhere else.

Or, perhaps the Kickstarter project is all there is. Once they make the 13 - 15k units (or what ever it ends up to be) for the developers they are done. They walk away. What sort of future does any console have when rounded to the nearest million units there are zero out there ?

So its an interesting thing indeed. Having played with Android on the Pandaboard I can say its not a 'fun' place to be (well if you're trying to get something done, if you just want to hack Android its great fun) Obviously you can't know if it will be a runaway success or a well meaning implosion but either way its enlightening to see this crowd funded business model tried for this class of goods.

KaoruAoiShiho• 14 years ago

It's not going to be fully free probably. They're using it to bootstrap a game marketplace for their currency or whatever. They're probably going to have a facebook credits equivalent and that's how they'll make their money. Also whatever they can make from hardware.

pyoung2• 14 years ago

They have 29 more days to go, and are currently at $1.7M. Based on the # limits that they set for their pledges, I think it would be safe to assume that they hit about $3M. I am sure that this changes the equation quite a bit.

sandGorgon• 14 years ago

Your people costs are accurate but irrelevant. Cyanogenmod, MIUI and XDA has proven the viability of global, Android developer groups.

I daresay that they will be able to hire a bunch of Chinese android devs (e. g. the MIUI project) for less than 0.5 mil as opposed to 6 mil.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

Maybe you're not familiar with Android game economics. The but most of the top grossing games are "free" with in app payment (freemium virtual in game items). The success of freemium varies per game categories, in more incumbent game styles, there aren't many. But in newer innovative game types, like casual social games, in app payment is the main revenue source for over 70% of top grossing games. There's a clear tendency towards this model. But many (most) developers still don't understand it well (it's far from trivial to use right).

Their businesses model, as they make clear in their kickstarter page, is the same as others, take 30% rev share of the games (most of the critics seem to have not read that). Which is a multi-billionaire fast growing industry on Android. There's nothing obviously wrong with them selling hardware cheap to make up for it with games.

And their insistence on free games with in app payment only shows they understand this industry much better than most game developers. Which gives them a huge leg over slow incumbent giants like nintendo and MS. Who are still struggling to understand what the hell this freemium thing is for. (tip: if you see a game developer use terms like "DLC" or "DRM", it's a red flag that they're not catching up with our time)

petercooper2• 14 years ago

Bear in mind that if they "validate" the idea by getting a gigantic number of backers, they'll have investors throwing money at them to get a slice of that 30% royalties pie, a model Apple has strongly validated.

They have the independent air for now, but I think the chance of them taking funding from somewhere is pretty high in the long run for many of the reasons you state.

josephcooney• 14 years ago

Agree. Most stories that paint apple in an unfavourable light that I post never seem to go anywhere. Yesterday I saw this on the verge and posted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222245 , to the sound of a deafening "meh".

cooldeal• 14 years ago

If you think HN is anti-Android, then look at what happens to stories and comments about Microsoft. Stories are flagged and comments are downvoted based on party line voting.

martingordon• 14 years ago

I didn't post anything in the original thread, but I had a negative initial reaction to the original article.

For me, at least, it has to do with three things:

1. The framing of the product. They make it sound like it will change to landscape of the video game market, not that it could. This type of grandiose posturing reeks of snake oil to me and turns me off completely. The device be a moderate success and sell a couple of million of units, but there's no way that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Apple (yes, Apple) are going to see it as a threat to their current gaming ecosystems. Each currently have an installed base of at least 60 million (with the admittedly dead-end Wii coming in at almost 100 million and iOS at over 200 million), and more importantly, household recognition thanks to millions in advertising spend. What needs to happen for this device to end up in 50 million living rooms? How likely are those things to happen?

2. Being wildly successful on Kickstarter is one thing, having social proof in the form of professional funding (VC, angel, and/or otherwise) is another thing. After all, it's easier to get 10,000 people to give you $100 than it is for one person to give you $1 million. I am strongly opposed to the "raise money now, make money later" approach to startups and wholeheartedly believe that it is possible to build a software startup by bootstrapping. That said (and this might just be due to my inexperience with hardware development), I don't know that it's possible to build a successful hardware business that requires significant capital outlay to get started without outside funding. Are these things profitable at the $99 price point? If not, where is the cash going to come from to mass produce these. Is 10-100k purchases enough to swing a Series A, even if those 10-100k were sold at or below cost? Kickstarter seems like a great way to sell small-batch, niche products, but not necessary any huge mainstream successes.

All of it boils down to this: I used to like innovative products just because they're innovative, but I've seen too many "great" products burned by a lack of a viable business behind the product. If I'm going to commit to a product or service, I need to know that it will be around for the long haul. I can no longer judge products on their own, I have to judge them based on their viability on the marketplace.

five_star• 14 years ago

I also believe android has potential in the market. I wonder why the thread seems to go against it.

kevingadd5• 14 years ago

As an author of one of the comments that apparently has made people so upset, I guess I should respond.

I don't see what your problem with my comment was. I provided a short list of clearly stated arguments why I believe their price point is unfounded and will impair their ability to ship a product, and why the price point (along with the marketing) suggests an incomplete knowledge of the problems they're attempting to address.

Why does this matter? Two reasons:

First, every large Kickstarter that takes money and fails to deliver will be an enormous hit to the viability of crowd-funding in general, and potentially increase the difficulties faced by other crowd-funded projects in terms of convincing backers to wait patiently for release. If something like the Ouya collects $3M in kickstarter funding and flames out violently, you can bet there will be lawyers lining up to file class action suits. Once this happens, the doors are probably open for harmful actions against all sorts of crowd-funded projects. This is all the more troublesome because game projects are in general troubled projects, so adding the spectre of legal threats isn't exactly going to improve things.

Second, the degree to which the project feels slapped together or not well thought out suggests a potential to cause harmful effects on the development community and the way game players engage with it. While from a revenue perspective, the modern wave of free-to-play and Facebook games is a tremendous thing - making plenty of people rich - the social effects are yet to be fully understood. The mechanics heavily leveraged by these games are, to the extent they are understood by psychology and testing, not harmless and in some cases extremely harmful to the players over both the short and long term. The business models behind these games fundamentally encourage building around singular players spending to the limit of their ability (or beyond it), and use the kind of abusive terminology previously used in casinos and the development of slot machines. Now there are even companies trying to convince game developers to use their middleware to turn their games into actual slot machines where players gamble real money.

Ouya's push is heavily predicated on it being about free to play games, the vast majority of which fall into the previously described category - destructive and built on psychological manipulation. The low price point means that Ouya would be the perfect choice for lower-income families that would otherwise not consider buying an expensive game console, and the emphasis on Android games being 'cheap' means that the majority of the games out there will be free downloads or a $1 purchase with the intent of getting players onto the microtransaction treadmill. I do not think this sort of future is good for anyone except investors (though in the short term, developers will benefit tremendously).

So I suppose yes, You could say that I "don't get it": I don't get why you would decide to abuse your entire customer base for short term profit at the expense of long term market health.

Some of the anger and dismissiveness in comments probably is, as you say, just about how it's android or about how it's open source or about how it was crowdfunded instead of VCd, or whatever. None of that is really a concern for me, as a person who doesn't own any Apple devices, hates OS X, uses an Android phone, develops open source projects, and hasn't ever been given a cent by venture capitalists or angel investors. I still think Ouya is probably going to be a bad thing unless the people running the project make a serious effort to curtail the potential for it to cause negative consequences for the industry as a whole.

reedlaw• 14 years ago

I appreciate your analysis of the free-to-play games becoming more and more abusive. But I've long preferred buying quality games over free games with up-selling. Eventually many people will come to realize that games that prey on addictions to gambling-like behavior are no fun. If the general public doesn't learn this lesson, then you will have less to fear from consoles like Ouya than from all of iOS and Android devices put together.

tung2• 14 years ago

The problem with your original comment[1] is that many people feel it has potential you're not only not giving it credit for, but are actively trying to sabotage its chances of success.

The crux of your comments are two-fold: (1) if OUYA succeeds, it'll be the Facebook/Zynga console that preys on the poor to line the pockets of the rich, and (2) if it fails, it hurts Kickstarter and Kickstarter projects.

The view that "the vast majority of" the games of OUYA will be "built on psychological manipulation" is the most deeply cynical and skewed views of indie games I've ever read. Maybe I'm biased: I follow indie game developers a lot, I read their forum comments and blog posts, I listen to their podcasts, play many of their games (more than AAA titles) and watch YouTube play-throughs of others by other people. The message is the same: indie game developers are trying to do what they love while introducing something unique and interesting to the world, and those who go full-time want to make ends meet, a lot like many start-up founders. They're pretty frank and don't mince words, and not one of them has so much as hinted that they want to get rich by preying on the weak. This is counter to the Hacker News view, which is stories of indie games making millions of dollars, horrible tales of Facebook and Zynga using gambling psychology to nickel-and-dime the poor and addicted, and the Kickstarter gold rush being exploited by the smart and greedy. If I had to choose which view of indie games was reality, I'd believe the actual developers before the sensational stories that hit the Hacker News front page.

As for if OUYA fails, I can't say for sure what impact it will have, but it probably won't hold back Kickstarter or other promising Kickstarter projects. Should it follow the history of failed open consoles of development past, it will at most just fade into the background, never to be heard from again until somebody takes another stab at it.

The meatiest part of your original comment (ignoring the deep cynicism ingrained in it that people objected to) are the factors that may cause it to fail:

- Ability to deliver on its $99 cost, given most consoles sell at a loss that they recoup in titles.

As somebody who watches a lot of StarCraft 2 on TwitchTV and loves the variety of indie games, I'd consider the OUYA worthwhile even at 2-3 times this price.

- Anemic hardware: 8 GB for downloaded titles with only USB2 for expansion.

Thing like this can and may well be fixed; from OUYA's Kickstarter page[2]:

> Launching on Kickstarter – this isn't just a way to raise funds. It's our way of involving supporters from the get go. We want your feedback as well as your support.

They seem open to this kind of feedback.

- the "lazy" (I'd claim short-sighted) factor, e.g. color-coded only buttons are hard to communicate, especially for the color-blind

See above. Putting shapes on the buttons would be trivial, and the controller is stated to be a prototype, not a final product.

- lack of a killer app and seeming reliance on the Android Market to fill the gap

I expanded all the FAQ segments, ran a search on the page and didn't get one hit for "android market", so that's just speculation.

On not having a killer app, the big sell of OUYA to me isn't the presence of one really good game, but as a nexus of indie games I can quickly try and go through. I played many early versions of Spelunky[3] well before it became big through word-of-mouth. POWDER[4] isn't a massive commercial hit with tons of attention or press, but I've spent many fun hours with it. OUYA presents this one place where I can go through a ton of games to find gems like these; I don't have to worry about THE killer app if I can find MY killer apps.

Overall, as a person who plays lots of indie games and watches StarCraft 2, I see potential in OUYA, even if it can only deliver on half of its promises. The deeply scathing and cynical judgment you've passed is not only undeserved, but actively hurts it, which is pretty sad.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224014

[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...

[3] http://www.spelunkyworld.com/

[4] http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about

checoivan3• 14 years ago

I agree, people seem negative focusing too much in outermost layer like memory size, or that it isn't as powerful as an xbox.

take a look at this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_ret...

The trend is game sales are down year over year. Studios are closing because massive multi million dollar productions are simply unsustainable. You see games being more expensive, have ads and sponsors on it, gameplay is cut down and sold as expensive downloadable content, and every game is using gimmicks like plastic toys to be able to sell a game copy for 99 or 150 bucks. And every year publishers have to one up in themselves like Charlie sheen going from a week long to a month long party.

Another concrete example: Kingdom of Amalur's developer Studio 38. The game has an epic franchise, great reviews, strong first month sales. The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC.

Development for consoles is very inaccesible. Even for XBox which uses DirectX and can be downloaded. How many of people you know that programmed a ps3 game in college? '

There has to be a reversal of this trends and a console like this seems like a step in the right direction. So far seems like only nintendo figured out it's all about delivering fun that people like, not who has the biggest processor.

People doubt the 99 dollar price. Maybe it comes out being 150 or slightly more expensive, we don't know. It can definitively be cheap. Supposedly a Nexus 7 costs 184 dollars to make, 57 are just for the screen. Take out the screen, sensors,camera, battery, cut down memory...It sounds reasonable it could hit the price point.

laserDinosaur2• 14 years ago

"The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC"

Not exactly. They broke even if not made a little profit on Kingdom of Amalur, not bad for a new IP from a new company. What killed them was they were building a massive MMO on the side that, accordiding to the Giant Bomb guys, never had enough money to finish and was funded from quarter to quarter based on new investments. A huge gamble. When the mayor came out saying they were a poor investment, their money dried up overnight and nobody would touch them. So, with a partially built MMO and bills needing to be paid they shut their doors. (source - ramblings from the Giant Bomb podcast and E3 interviews with David Jaffe)

laserDinosaur2• 14 years ago

"Another concrete example: Kingdom of Amalur's developer Studio 38. The game has an epic franchise, great reviews, strong first month sales. The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even."

Not exactly. They broke even if not made a little profit on Kingdom of Amalur, not bad for a new IP from a new company. What killed them was they were building a massive MMO on the side that, according to the Giant Bomb guys, never had enough money to finish and were just funded from quarter to quarter based on new investments. A huge gamble. When the mayor came out saying they were a poor investment, their money dried up overnight and nobody would touch them. So, with a partially built MMO and bills needing to be paid they shut their doors. (source - ramblings from the Giant Bomb podcast and E3 interviews with David Jaffe)

saym• 14 years ago

What is to stop someone from making their own? I foresee custom app stores and custom games along with people building one with a terabyte of internal storage.

Or why not just build a PC with an OUYA OS partitioned drive?

lbrdn2• 14 years ago

Cool project, but at $99 for a console and controller they must be operating at a loss, right? Does anyone have any insight into production costs of something like this? It could change the way we think about the "amount raised".

joering2• 14 years ago

how about 3 folks @ $10,000.

Its great to see that KickStarter has such a network effect!!

saraid216• 14 years ago

The thread on the Kickstarter itself has significant discussion on that question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223627

beagle3• 14 years ago

The RaspberryPi is NOT selling at a loss for $35. Neither is the AppleTV at $100 (or $80, which you can find new every other week on eBay). Nor are the Roku boxes that sell at $50-$100 for 720p-1080p playback and many, many others. Neither, for that matter, is the Huawei Android 3G phone at $80.

It can even be profitable at $100, if (and that's a huge if) they know what they are doing.

lbrdn2• 14 years ago

No need to yell beagle (or was that a Borat impression). I am simply curious about how much a device like this would cost a small company to build per unit on a first run. AppleTV isn't a fair comparison given the efficiencies of scale and what not, nor is it running video games as far as I know. And while I don't know much about RaspberryPi, their website states that the "graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance" which I imagine Ouya is trying to exceed. Moreover, RaspberryPi doesn't come with a fancy shell or a controller.

mtgx7• 14 years ago

Hopefully Google will allow them access to the Play Store, otherwise devs will have to repackage the apps for Ouya, which I'm sure it's not going to be a huge deal if this thing takes off. But it would be a nice gesture from Google, and it would be in their interest, too, especially if they have no plans of doing the same thing with Google TV set top boxes.

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

From the standpoint of their ultimate success, the key is their installed base. If they have say 20k or 30k machines out there, will developers care enough to target them?

It wouldn't matter if they were just another Android platform, they'll have Android games from the mass market. But if they plan to make money off revenue sharing with devs, they gotta have the machines out there.

I'm impressed that they're going to get this thing done, I just hope the get enough made to survive.

trotsky3• 14 years ago

They're not going to be putting the play store on there for the same reason amazon doesn't put it on the fire - their model is to provide the payment/content ecosystem for the ol' 70/30 split.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

On a perfect world, they'd get a special partnership with google to get an extra OUYA tab to the play store. For OUYA dedicated games, which would show on OUYA devices and pay OUYA developers with that. Even if google would sacrifice their 30% for it. It still seems like this would be the ideal deal for all parties: users, developers, google and ouya.

jcdavis2• 14 years ago

Link to the actual project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...

Pretty pathetic that The Atlantic is just embedding the project's video without even an actual link. Why the hell do so many sites still do this?

Wingman4l7• 14 years ago

It's inexcusable. Blogs, traditional journalism's favorite whipping boy, will at least cite their sources.

jcdavis2• 14 years ago

Update: can't seem to edit my original post, but there is now a link, someone came to their senses

guscost2• 14 years ago

Will this device be able to play audio with less than 20 milliseconds of latency?

mtgx7• 14 years ago

Not sure, but if they update it to Android 4.1+, it should have 12 ms or lower.

guscost2• 14 years ago

I'm worried the new figure also depends on the hardware in the Nexus, but that would be absolutely splendid news.

mtgx7• 14 years ago

It seems BI has an exclusive interview with them:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ouya-raises-1-million-kicksta...

comatose_kid• 14 years ago

Let the ass kicking begin. Great idea, goog should fund em because this is one of the ways they can one-up iOS.

shadowmint• 14 years ago

On the bright side, because this is basically phone hardware, they can probably manufacture at a price point that makes this viable.

...or maybe not. People aren't really great as making estimates, and that's a lot of $99 devices (10k odd units so far?), but you'd like to think they've thought that through.

Good luck to them. They've obviously tapped into something that resonates with a lot of people~

(...and if it doesn't work out, watching the rage face of people who think they've bought something and then realize kickstarter isnt a shop when they get nothing is going to be fun to watch...)

duey• 14 years ago

This looks like a really awesome idea, but I can't help but wonder if they are walking into a patent minefield?

visualphoenix• 14 years ago

Agreed.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130152/the_ten_most_im...

The patents on video game controllers alone might be enough to kill them. Remember the Sony/Microsoft rumble debacle?

checoivan3• 14 years ago

Underpowered? I think not. Look at Nintendo DS: 67mhz Arm9. Who cares? Only developers because it's a pain in the butt to program for the thing. Other than that it delivers fun games and prints money(or so the meme says).

Quad core and an easy API seem like 1000x a better choice than a ps3 with 8 cores, a not so easy api, and a 10,000usd dev kit.

Yes, graphics won't compete with the next gen games, but there's more to a game than eye candy.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

So I have a question (Because I'm genuinely curious and I'm not sure where to go to get this information.):

What successful projects received kickstarter funding above 100K? I've seen plenty of smaller successes, but I want to know if anyone who took one of these huge donation piles has delivered yet.

wmf2• 14 years ago

Diaspora delivered something, although not in the timeframe they claimed.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

I almost never give to fundraisers online but I've dropped several hundred on this - that's how much I believe we sorely need a popular, open, indie-oriented gaming device that isn't a regular PC. (And before anyone scoffs, remember Diaspora?)

Will OUYA be the one to pull it off? With some skin in the game I'm hoping so, but the key thing to pick up from their copy is how strongly they're looking for validation rather than just money. So even if you think their implementation is lame at the moment, if you believe in the idea of an indie console, I'd encourage you to give the $10 just to boost the backer count (which I think is more important in the long run). And I'd encourage them to add a lower donation tier for exactly this reason too..

Athens79• 14 years ago

1) Developers will probably not make any money on games for it. Its a problem for Android too. Many good iOS games will never be ported over to Android because of this. And some developers have left Android after products didn't make any money. Its a culture problem, plus pirates made it a terrible market to make money 2) Open system easy to hack, its going to rub FPS multi-player games useless. Its already killing the PC gaming of that type. 3) Licenses and patents, and honestly I can't see those specs being sold at that $99 price tag period. 4) Lack of marketing ability to attract the players to make the market large enough to attract developers 5) The few open source titles that are decent games are so late 1990's quality in graphics. Though graphics are very highly over rated, game play is much more important and there just isn't that many with great game play. 6) Intense pressure from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will knock it down in lawsuits if it ever did gain traction. Or just out right buy the company to kill it. 7) As mobile phones continue to push the envelope in performance, the few good games it might be able to offer will evolve around those more powerful phones and will probably leave that thing in the dust with ability to play games a year or 2 down the road. Mobile gaming ability and phone power is increasing exponentially, unlike the slow pace of desktops which had that kind of growth a decade ago. 8) When they do start having to make good money to solve these problems, to cover costs of the machine, litigation's, patients, paying developers to make games worthy enough to attract paying customers, the very people it cater to that nitch Linux Open blah blah group will turn away from it.

This is why desktop gaming has always been the domain of Windows PC's, and for mobile its the domain of iOS and for portable its still a nice race between Sony and Nintendo, both of which is hurting over iOS gaming.

wtracy• 14 years ago

I'm curious why they're designed their own controller and not just going with something from, say, Logitech. Seems like one less thing to worry about.

savrajsingh• 14 years ago

I have a feeling we have a new contender for most money ever raised on kickstarter. See you in 29 days! 40m? Just a guess. Congrats ouya!

bertomartin• 14 years ago

Awesome, I just pushed them past $2 mil

Gaming Console Ouya Raises $1 Million on Kickstarter in 8 Hours

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