The Ouya works, it’s here, and it’s heading your way

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-ouya-works-its-here-and-its-heading-your-way-our-first-look-at-the-fini

by richeyrw • 13 years ago

203 108 13 years ago

bluetidepro2• 13 years ago

I'm really excited to get mine soon! Does anyone have any resources for people who want to dabble in creating a game for Ouya? Is it as basic as just making an HTML5 game with a wrapper of some sort? I would love to see some basic "how-to" type articles.

allsystemsgo• 13 years ago

I was under the impression that Ouya is running Android? So you'd write it in Java ideally. I may be wrong though.

bluetidepro2• 13 years ago

I think that actually does sound right, if I remember correctly. So, to modify my question, does anyone have any good tutorials on creating games with Java for Android? I'm just starting to get the hang of making HTML5 games, but it would be nice to see how I could translate that to work for Android devices.

sp3n• 13 years ago

if you happen to know actionscript 3, you can also use adobe flash builder or flash develop - as adobe air can target android/ios devices just fine

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

You don't need to write Android apps in Java; you can write them in C, or in any language that can compile to native code and use a C API via FFI.

In any case, for games, you probably want to start learning OpenGL ES.

mikec3k2• 13 years ago

Yes, it does run Android.

kayoone• 13 years ago

easiest would be to use something like unity or shiva

duked2• 13 years ago

I didn't receive mine yet but as a backer I was pretty disappointed to learn only yesterday (in their last email) that I have to put my CC on file to download demos. I know some people may not have a problem with that but even on my Apple Store account I can download free apps without a CC.

From their email: "You'll need a credit/debit card to download games. All games are still free to try. Your card will only be charged if you buy content you love. We do want valid payment information for everyone. This is to ensure that game developers can get paid when you love their game."

The article mention gift card, but I just don't want to pay a gift card that I may not use just to download demos. Well I guess I'll use the hardware as a MAME box, and video player.

shawnbaden• 13 years ago

I'm in agreement with you on this. OUYA has proven to be very receptive to community feedback so it's good to voice concerns. It has a good chance of being reassessed.

duked2• 13 years ago

True, on the comment page of their kickstarter a lot of people expressed their concerns over the CC requirements. I really hope they will at least communicate on that particular issue soon

Deezul• 13 years ago

The CC is on file in order to streamline the purchase process when you decide to buy something. For OUYA to be a success there needs to be an appealing app ecosystem. That won't happen unless it gains developer interest and developers often invest in markets with a profit motive.

thejosh2• 13 years ago

That doesn't make sense. Having a credit card on file does not lead to a better app ecosystem.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

I have a semi-disposable pre-paid credit card[1] that I load with a small amount of cash and use only for uncertain transactions.

I agree that storing a CC number has a number of problems (including lack of parental controls, as mention in the article).

[1] Yes, calling something a credit card when it doesn't allow me any credit, and doesn't provide some of the advantages of credit cards is annoying.

foobarqux• 13 years ago

Are pre-paid credit cards really indistinguishable from credit cards?

I thought that some merchants didn't accept them for various reasons.

gfodor• 13 years ago

You're in the minority as most people will enter their credit cards, as you say, and they will make lots more money because of this. It's a smart move and they are certainly aware of the cost-benefit ratio. (I bet that you will enter your credit card ultimately in the end if you buy one of these things, despite your concerns, since you will eventually cave once an inevitable "must play" game enters the ecosystem.)

danso• 13 years ago

According to the Kickstarter page, the Ouya was due out in March 2013:

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

I'm pretty sure I was one of the many naysayers who said the Ouya would never make that launch date. Hell, I once ordered underwear from a Kickstarter clothing outfit and that came at least three months late. I've supported several Kickstarters and none of them have delivered the physical goods within two months of their promise (I've even had one delayed by a year). The Ouya is late by a couple of weeks, if even that.

Congrats to Ouya for meeting their goal, here's hoping that their system is a success.

eropple2• 13 years ago

The reports of system problems are already rolling in, though. In particular it seems that the controller has perceptible input lag; that's an immediate killer for pretty much any gaming-related product.

They might have shipped, but it remains to be seen if they shipped something that's any good.

durin42• 13 years ago

Got any source for that controller input lag? That does sound like a bummer.

jonny_eh3• 13 years ago

I don't know where this is coming from. I can't perceive any lag in my unit when playing all sorts of games. I've hooked up an xbox 360 controller and there's no difference. There's no more input lag on an ouya than on an xbox 360 as far as I can tell.

There are a couple games built using an older version of the ouya Unity plugin that introduced some lag, so that might explain it.

Full disclosure: I am an employee of OUYA. But any developer that has had a dev unit for the past 3 months can chime in. We never got this feedback until a couple people in the press brought it up.

mtgx• 13 years ago

This is only for the Kickstarter backers, though. The public launch is in June. If the lag is due to software, it could be fixed by then, for everyone.

alainbryden• 13 years ago

I hope these people are carefully considering the many sources of input lag[1], especially display lag, before giving the controller a bad rap.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag

xradionut3• 13 years ago

Is it wrong of me that I wouldn't mind turning one into a Linux system and not run Android or play games? (After all this is Hacker News...)

eropple2• 13 years ago

An ODROID would probably be better for your purposes.

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/main.php

xradionut3• 13 years ago

Considering features sets, an Odroid wouldn't be as cost effective.

abraininavat• 13 years ago

Why would you do that? The days of yearning for a small hardware platform on which one can install Linux are over. You can fit Linux on a computer that would fit in your wallet.

xradionut3• 13 years ago

Why not? That's the question to ask. :)

DanBC2• 13 years ago

> Why would you do that?

There's a tradition of putting operating systems on anything. FreeBSD runs on cameras and game consoles and all sorts of devices that did not intend the user to install an OS.

So it's just a fun gimmicky project.

Bjartr• 13 years ago

Because it's there[1]

[1] http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badger.shtml

nazgulnarsil• 13 years ago

you can get android on a stick for $24

stinos• 13 years ago

well even before I backed it I realized a) I don't have time to play games and b) it's been years since I played any game so I'm not sure if I'll like it. So I just bought it with the idea of running a distro with SickBeard/SabNzbd/Xbmc. Just like I did with the Raspberry Pi, but that is just a tad too slow. So, no, I wouldn't say you're wrong. It's good to see people are still into this stuff.

Cushman4• 13 years ago

Not a comment on the Ouya specifically, but we live in an odd moment in computing history when many of us carry powerful computers with us everywhere we go, but connecting them to our existing peripherals is difficult enough that we'd rather just buy another with the right plug.

I wonder how long this will last.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

Connectors and physical controllers remain expensive and difficult to make. "Computers" just fall to the base price of etching a circuit board.

This is the new normal. The connector is the valuable part.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

This captures it. The cost to add the transistors to put an ARM CPU in silicon is < the cost of the metals in the USB and HDMI connector you use to talk to it.

I gave a talk on the Internet of Things where I tried to communicate this point clearly, for more and more applications the marginal cost to add a computer is nearly 0, the marginal cost to add a network is about $0.35, so a lot of things that wouldn't have had networks or computers in them before suddenly do.

Back when Sun Micro was trying to get everyone in the Java group to write up patents on anything they could think of, James Gosling in what was a great comment on the process wrote up one for Java inside a light switch. He reasoned it was the most ridiculous patent ever since a light switch from Home Depot was $1.50 and there was no amount of "coolness" you could add with Java that would merit building a light switch with its own processor. What he didn't count on was that the cost of the computer that could run Java would drop below the cost to make a mechanical switch.

Cushman4• 13 years ago

> This is the new normal. The connector is the valuable part.

Right, and I read this as "the connector is the next thing to go". Someday (one hopes) all of this will be done by software radio, anything that needs to be really fast will be over a generic optical interconnect, and the idea of buying a particular computer because it has a bit of copper that mates with your particular display will be humorously antiquated... like steam engines, or cursive handwriting.

angryasian• 13 years ago

I think this is only the outlook of casual gamers or (no troll) apple users that tend to only use apple products in their ecosystems.

Android is very rich with bluetooth controllers and microusb to hdmi adapters like this http://www.amazon.com/SlimPort%C2%AE-SP1002-Connect-connecto... .

As someone that would rather pay a little more for a real console, I really don't see the appeal of Ouya.

IheartApplesDix2• 13 years ago

Ouya has no appeal to anyone but kids and shovelware authors who think they'll make a lot of money making crap games. It's obviously a trial run to knock out bugs and hacks in their distribution system and tighten up the security on their custom ARM hypervisior. Then they'll kill the Ouya, license the hypervisior as their product which they'll be able to sell to a large base of ARM Cortex based device manufacturers as a field tested DRM solution.

6ren• 13 years ago

Many smartphones have HDMI out, and usb for a controller. It seems inevitable that they'll replace consoles (and desktops/laptops). Especially with wireless controllers and HDMI.

But I think the significant thing is price: you cannot buy a comparable smartphone for $99. This will always be true, because the smartphone needs a display, a battery, be compact, light, and not drain that battery too fast. What will change is that, eventually, smartphones that are good enough for games will be cheaper than $99 (or whatever price-point is then relevant). Although batteries are not improving at Moore's Law rates, this point will probably be reached surprisingly soon.

Bold prediction: the next generation of xbox/playstation/wii will fail for this reason. (smartphone GPUs will likely reach xbox360 levels this year; and the mainstream hasn't been demanding the more powerful GPUs of PCs, unlike previous generations).

jodrellblank• 13 years ago

Aside from that, even being able to plug things in doesn't guarantee a useful connection.

I can plug a tablet into a computer by USB, but it can't be a keyboard. Even though it contains a keyboard - is a superset of keyboard components - it still doesn't have the software to do it. Nor can it be a USB soundcard, or a USB display.

(But it can be a second display over TCP/IP and that can be done over a USB-Ethernet dongle which it does support).

Quite precisely what can be usefully plugged into what, is a website I've considered creating for a long time.

tenpoundhammer2• 13 years ago

I give Ouya 5 million space points for the 'make' option. That's the most incredible part of this whole system. Develop on the box you play on... It's just revolutionary. If this thing can catch it might just revolutionize and destroy the gaming industry as we know it.

Macsenour• 13 years ago

Commodore 64? Develop on it for it. So mebbe the revolution started without you... in the 80's. :)

I agree that we'll see a lot more games developed in garages and on weekends. And I think that's where a lot of the unique games come from. But this won't destroy the gaming industry at all. It will help usher out folks who shouldn't be in the industry in the first place.

podperson9• 13 years ago

Any early computer. Heck, UNIX was developed so the bored team members could play games on an old minicomputer.

tenpoundhammer2• 13 years ago

I didn't say it would "destroy the gaming industry." I said, "It would destroy the gaming industry as we know it." Meaning that it could radically change the economics and the way we play and consume games.

mikec3k2• 13 years ago

I can't wait to receive my Ouya, as a $99 backer.

BryantD• 13 years ago

That's an encouraging review. I am not a backer, because I'm cynical, but that's quite promising.

This paragraph got me thinking: "I can't point to a single game that would make one need to buy a system at launch. Much of the value of the OUYA hardware lies in what you can do with it, from media functions to creating your own games. It's very possible that a breakout game is coming, and we just don't know what is it yet, but at this point it's hard to point to one single game that will get you to buy a unit."

For a traditional console, that would be a huge issue. (Ask Nintendo about the Wii U launch.) Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo spend a lot of cash making sure there will be excellent launch titles. Traditional wisdom is that launch titles drive console sales.

On the other hand, the current generation of smartphones didn't have big launch titles. Possibly the landscape has changed.

On the third hand, smartphones do other things than play games.

On the fourth hand, sounds like the Ouya might be a strong media console, depending on how slick that XBMC integration is. C.f. the number of people who bought Playstation 3s as a Blu-ray player.

In any case, I'm impressed that hardware is shipping and I was wrong to think it wouldn't. I'd keep an eye on those lag reports, though; I would think Penny Arcade and Polygon are smart enough to think about video lag as a possibility.

codezero• 13 years ago

The opened up controller looks kind of haggard. The controller in the image here looks more abused than ny 6 year old XBox 360 controller, hopefully their production models are more durable than this one looks.

IheartApplesDix2• 13 years ago

You can lead a horse to metered water but you can't make him put a quarter in the booth.

drawkbox• 13 years ago

Very excited to get mine. It is funny though as I look at OUYA, Steambox, even GameCube of old and other console cubes appear and can't help that Jobs almost called it too early with the Mac Cube a bit before it's time and not targeting the right area of the house yet while GameCube did around the same time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube - probably based on NeXTCube).

Hopefully the game controller for Apple TV isn't really an April Fool's Joke as AppleTV is close to being the next big console possibly.

mcdoh• 13 years ago

I think Roku is closer than AppleTV. It has "wiimote" that can be turned sideways as a gamepad or used as a motion capture remote. Not to mention they actually let people develop for the platform, they just need to offer something other than that terrible Basic clone, BrightScript.

just2n• 13 years ago

I was initially thinking the Ouya would be cool. But then I actually thought about the console space and realized that what was true of my younger years is no longer the case. In particular, a NES was significantly different than a Windows or Unix workstation. The console was an entirely different platform/ecosystem, and in a time where they were reasonably complex by comparison other computing operating systems.

These days, we're literally running the same software we run on everything else, but in a little box that has an audio/video output and a port for a controller. And then when I realized that, I immediately realized that the console is mostly dead. The only case where this isn't true is where performance metrics are consistent. This is why development on platforms like a PS3 or 360 result in shorter dev cycles and higher quality results: the hardware is all the same. But that matters when you're writing software that isn't shielded from the system, so with Java, that's a non factor, making Ouya nothing special.

I believe the next Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo will all have their merits -- high-end hardware that is consistent for years, which will allow developers to rapidly build games without having to concern themselves with the lowest common denominator (it's ridiculous to see software designed to run on a 512MB 1 core machine performing horribly on a 24GB machine with 6 cores, 2 GPUs, and 3GB of GPU memory because it was decided by someone that progressive enhancement of features would be too expensive a development cost, or for those high-end features to be completely non-optimized).

For me, I am summarily unimpressed and not excited. For me, this is packaging Java in yet-another-box that I have to buy. Why can't I just download an app and play Ouya games on my PC? That's a -1 for Ouya and a +1 for what Valve is doing with Steam.

andybak2• 13 years ago

I'm struggling to understand what you ar saying here to the point where I wonder if you've missed the biggest factor for the Ouya which is this.

It's that it's part of a (potentially and to a degree actually) huge Android ecosystem with the same games running on phones, tablets, consoles, Smart TVs, media centers, mini-PCs and netbooks.

Doesn't that change things?

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

The important part is the controller and potentially a market of games for it.

While it sounds nice to run the same game on a console and a touchscreen I don't see that working too well in reality.

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

The question is whether PCs are approaching the advantages of consoles from the other side. Are hardware requirements and iterations stabilizing? Are operating systems stabilizing?Are gaming APIs stabilizing?

I bought a gaming computer last summer and was quite impressed with it until its SSD died (I have to get it shipped to me and replace that SSD at some point). With an ordinary Windows 7 installation it ran a full gamut of emulators, ran the Source engine with the quality settings turned pretty far up, and ran everything else available on Steam with good quality, too. It also played DVDs and downloaded movies in high-def and with good sound, as well.

My real question is: over how many years of usage can I amortize the cost of that gaming PC? Because a lightly-used or "last year" gaming PC costs $600-$800, while a new one with top of the line hardware costs about $1000-$1200. If I can keep it for 6 years like I would with a console, the new console can match the one-year-old gaming PC for price, while the PC has general media functions, retains backwards compatibility via emulation, and gives me choice of peripherals.

Hmmm... but the traditional disadvantage of PCs was having to upgrade your hardware, operating system, and APIs continually to keep up with new features in the gaming world, whereas with a console you'd just drop $200-$300 every 4-6 years for the new system. With a PC, upgrading the graphics card, motherboard or the hard drive might easily cost that much, depending on just how up-to-date you keep it.

Seems to me there's a space for a "Ship of Theseus" model of PC, where the cost of hardware upgrades made every few years can approach the cost of a new console with the same frequency while retaining backwards compatibility.

mercury8882• 13 years ago

so you are saying that a game must have high end graphics or else it only applies to the lowest common denominator?

What about the fact that this thing boots up faster than a pc, is dedicated to focus on entertainment around the TV space as consoles are and is a system that is priced at $99. Call me a realist but a pc can do alot of the things my mp3 player can. But i dont want to have to lug around by pc just so i can listen to songs.

Oh and you do know steam is also coming out with their own console right? This only solidifies the notion that there is still a growing market for non techie individuals who want entertainment in their living rooms. Personally i prefer crowding around a big tv when playing console style games with friends. Its a bit hard to do that on 1 computer and 1 keyboard.

novaleaf• 13 years ago

fyi, i submitted a game for ouya, and the system is not ready.

1) the dev sdk is not yet complete. Try figuring out how to bring up the in-game menu, or "pause" using the controller. Seems logical that's what the middle button should be for, but there isn't any sort of guidance on this in the api.

2) my game is developed using unity, and runs on android (it's in the google play store). We get my game building using the official Ouya plugin, but without dev hardware, our ability to test is extremely limited, but we do our best to plug in an xbox controller and make sure everythign works. .... so we submit the game to ouya, and they reject it citing "the game takes turns every one second after starting, and the music keeps playing after exiting the game"..... since my game doesn't actually have "turns", and we use Unity as an engine so don't actually do anything special for exiting, I emailed them back asking for clarification ... and got no response.

rant: they name the controllers buttons OUYA. wtf seriously? they couldn't use ABXY?

JVIDEL• 13 years ago

Personally I would have totally buyed the ouya 2 years ago when the average Android phone was still too weak to play anything more demanding than angry birds without choking on it. But today, miracast+N4+X360 controller and you have something that mops the floor with the ouya, game over.

But the biggest irony is that I would really dig this thing if it were a portable: touchscreen controls suck, there's no way around it. The xperia play was a fiasco and the Vita is going to die any day now. There are portable consoles running android but spec-wise they are all pathetic, and the quality of some is just subpar. If the ouya was a GBASP with a Tegra3 it would be the best portable console ever made, and would blow any phone out of the water when it comes to gaming.

dannowatts• 13 years ago

i didn't back this project, but it's really exciting to see that they have shipped the ouya, on time. much props to the ouya team and all involved!

The Ouya works, it’s here, and it’s heading your way

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