Why did the Ouya microconsole fail? A rant!

[Keatah]

I try to literally own every videogame and computer console, but I stayed away from this one. It didn't sit right with me from the start. It was too in-between trying to be its own thing as well as an Android console. It had an identity crisis.

Unfortunately I find this true of a lot of tech products. Ouya was marketed as if it progenitor thought it might miss out on the next revolution. And never end up making one of their own.

 

Honestly, I doubt many believed this would be a hit.

I did, but then I used to be a flunky for early-adoption of tech things. And this console appeared to have better specifications than the old 12-year old laptop I can't afford to upgrade.

[108 Stars]

 

I did, but then I used to be a flunky for early-adoption of tech things. And this console appeared to have better specifications than the old 12-year old laptop I can't afford to upgrade.

And it is still good for that. OUYA may be dead commercially, but you can use it as an emulation machine still. And for that it will do a better job than your old laptop.

Don't be bitter. It is good that people spend money to help an idea... it just sucks when expectations are not met in the end.

 

The reason why I did not think it would be a real hit is that OUYA was tiny, and up against giants. Just the marketing aspect was so tiny for what a small, young company could do compared to behemoths like Sony, MS and Nintendo. And the big name studios call games with sales of under 2 million units flops. No way they would spend money to develop for the underdog. It had to be the indies, but those want to earn money too... and with the big console manufacturers opening up to indies, they brought their games to them too. So you could get the Call of Duty games etc on Xbox 360 or PS3, and the indie games meant to be the OUYA's bread and butter too. Customers had no reason to buy an OUYA, save for it being cheap.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I was born too late to have a desired opinion but I saw the Ouya at Best Buy and Target in Virginia and at least Target back in New York. I never had an ounce of desire to get it when it was announced / hyped because I immediately expected it to be a phone with a cheap controller full of some form of IAP / ad supported games. After I thought about the emulation aspect I off and on thought about it but my Wii is just too good at it for most systems I honestly spend real game time emulating. To me it looked like a cute box of sadness and frustration.

This. Ouya launched at major retailers and was a available for a short time thereafter. I remember seeing Ouya at Best Buy and Target and bought a second controller to replace my pre-launch one which had issues and needed a bit of modding to fix. Later on though, I started using a PS3 controller and never looked back.

Edited August 15, 2015 by stardust4ever

[Tickled_Pink]

I predicted its swift demise as soon as the Kickstarter launched. I saw little value in an Android system for the home. With more powerful hardware, perhaps, but that would have defeated the original premise of OUYA which, in itself, wasn't going to get enough people excited about it.

 

Price alone wasn't going to shift units. Raspberry Pi has done well due to price and impressive marketing but that never claimed to be anything other than something to experiment with. OUYA was intended to be a cheap console but, on the face of it, it wasn't that much cheaper than the competition. The few places in the UK that sell them shifts them out at around £99. For an extra £30 or so you can have an Xbox 360. If I were a gamer, a kid or a parent I know which one I'd be going for.

 

It was never going to be a success and, for once, I think I got it pretty spot on.

[Keatah]

Gaming, more than ever, needs to be consumed in moderation. And your poison must be chosen with great care these days. I limit my entertainment software purchases to $500 or less each year. And it isn't a difficult thing to do because I only get 1 or 2 titles in that year. Or like I said earlier I get some DLC for X-Plane.

 

Hardware is essentially free since friends and clients are always throwing out last year's old hardware and upgrading willy-nilly. I don't always get exactly what I want, but hey, staying just behind the curve for free, can't complain about that!

 

Another thing is that there is so much to do with classic hardware and emulators and disk images -- I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR IT ALL!! There's games and Apple II stuff from 1979 I've been meaning to work through and finish. And all the classic platforms I didn't play with as a kid like the TI99/4a, RS CoCo, Aquarius, TRS-80 Model I/III.. Actually I did play with them, but didn't learn much about them. Everything was Apple II WaReZ and BBS'ing. And when I wasn't BBS'ing I was pestering my parents for Apple II hardware - which I ended up getting by doing all sorts of odd jobs around town.

 

Back in the day I remember taking home A2-FS1, after spending 3 hours in Compu-Shop (being babysit by the guy with the Afro) while my parents shopped at Venture next door. Bummer deal, I had to pay for it. I thought my parents were. The week or so after that I got Space Raiders and Gorgon. Ohh the fun! And I was happy to have a II+ with a 48K+16K configuration! Woot! The games worked right away.

 

And while I payed a hefty sum of nearly $100 in 1980's Dollars for all these I didn't feel like I was being manipulated or coerced or part of an experiment. I felt that these and other 8-bit titles were made for hobbyists by hobbyists. And that I had as much fun playing them as the developer (I didn't know that word at the time) did in making them.

 

There didn't seem to be any money-tricks or scams or anything. I didn't need to subscribe, or upgrade the hardware, or anything. I did need to buy a joystick though. And we had loads of fun. The game sessions would go on for hours. Of course we had discovered WareZ already, but I liked the original disks with baggie insert and all. And it was a fun secondary game to try and figure out a way to copy them. So you kinda got 2 games in one, the one you paid for, and the puzzle of trying to copy the uncopyable! Talk about value. So as grade school kids we got creative and tried wiring, somehow, someway, two disk drives together and made a stobelight thing to be sure they were spinning in sync. And then connected the heads in parallel hoping the signal from the game disk would transfer itself to the blank disk. It didn't work. We tried arbitrarily changing things around in COPYA and that didn't work either. Then we discovered Locksmith and a whole new underground world opened up. It was a like a real-life text adventure game. Solve the puzzle, copy the disk, make a delivery to the big kids down the block, and try to talk them into giving me other games in exchange. And doing it without getting in trouble. Try talking my parents into letting stranger teenager guys come over to play with my computer and trade games and do BBS'ing. My parents were concerned about it all. I was not. Computing and gaming transcended the ages nicely, even though the "bigger kids" were only 4 years older than me. And we spoke a higher language like BASIC and 6502. Higher than the grammar shit they taught in school.

 

Well one day we got an ominous phone call. A guy was on the other end asking to talk to the kid with the computer games. I thought it might be the game police or somebody checking up on us or coming over to take me away. Something like that. I ran upstairs and hid all my 2 boxes of disks under the bed. I came down and all the guy said was, "The red dot. Look for the red dot." There was some banging and yelling and a loud click like as if the phone was being ripped out of the guy's face and slammed down hard.

 

That was odd and strange and I didn't think the game police or truant officer would behave that way. They'd just come over and take you. I was relieved and went back to my room and un-hid my boxes of disks. I put them back on the bookcase where they belonged. I finally stopped shaking and tentatively went back to playing some game on the Apple. Or maybe it was the VCS. I don't recall precisely. Maybe it was both.

 

Then I told my school buddies about what happened and we all agreed it was weird. And we got the idea we should look for a red dot someplace. I upended everything in the house, all dishes and stuff, all the crap in the garage. I looked around outside. Looked at all the mail all the books in the house page by page. We upturned all the niknaks and bric-a-brac. We found some green dot-like stickers and felt bottoms and faded price tags. I even shone a flashlight under that hulking Zenith Chromacolor II TV set, begging my parents to lift it up. There was an orange dot, like a QC inspection sticker. But it wasn't red. And big fucking deal. It was on the TV set. Didn't mean a damned thing. Soon enough I was getting obsessed with red dots and went to bed seeing them everywhere and being chased by them. Even Pac-Man was eating red dots. My therapist said I should imagine being Pac-Man if I couldn't get to sleep. Count the dots. It usually worked.

 

I barely made it through the next school day. I got yelled at for daydreaming and looking out the window and watching a rabbit hop and jump through the green grass. Maybe it was a squirrel. Yes, a squirrel. I was wondering what it was doing and if it ever went to school. Where would it go when it left the yard? I made up some stupid story to the teacher, but still got put on report. My muddy mind gyrated and slugged through the day. Reading, Math, Social Studies. Imagining the day stretched out on a synesthesia manifest time line twisting like pressurized intestines I don't dare relieve in school. Now lunchtime. I couldn't wait till it was over, with the sun screaming in my face. Finishing up with History and Religion. My head was like an underinflated car tire pressed up against the curb on a hot oppressive day full of sugar stickiness. Then the ride home where peace and quiet reigned, unless I choose it not to be so. Air conditioner going full blast. Junk food potato chips in abundance. No incessant teacher barking about bullshit stuff I'd never use. No overwhelming cloud headaches. I was away from the oppression and depression. Relief! I could dream about model rockets and Voyager and program my TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 without fear of getting yelled at. Now I could get to work and learn something useful. Indeed.

 

The evening progressed nicely. I told my parents to shut up and go away. I played VCS. Read my astronomy books as I was so fond of doing back in those days. I got to thinking about a BASIC program that could tell me how high my model rockets flew. It was a simple 10 liner program using a trig function or two. I whipped it up the same evening. And printed it out on the MX-80 dot matrix printer. It made this unholy tearing and screeching noise and it was especially louder after 10:30pm. I was thinking, ridiculously, if I got a MicroBuffer it would smooth out the data and the printer would become quieter. Just a thought. It didn't make sense, but maybe I could bullshit and string my parents along into getting me one on the premise the printer would work quieter. I printed it up and put it with the PC-1 so I wouldn't forget to type it in and have it ready for when I launched my Alpha-3 and Maxi Alpha-3 rockets the weekend ahead.

 

I wrapped up the evening with Apple II games, Star Dance, Gorgon, other stuff. The room was a mess. I didn't feel like cleaning up because I would just mess it again tomorrow and the day after. When I was done I pulled out the Gorgon disk and put on the pile of stuff on the desk. It inevitably slid off said pile and like toast landed upside down. And fuck'n lo and behold there was a red dot sticker on the back! The side facing up. I started freaking out. THIS was the ticket! The red dot the guy on the phone said to find! Ohh man what do I do now I thought. I called my buddy on my Space Patrol walkie talkie. These were good for 3 or 4 houses down the block, and it helped that his house was across the street - that meant the signal only had to cut through the window glass and not 20 walls in between like it would be if the houses were on the same side. I had modified them so they could be plugged in to the VCS power supply and this let them be powered on all the time without killing the batter. I told him to come right over. Parents were sleeping or getting it on. And lowered my fabric ladder 3 meters down so he could climb up.

 

We weren't sure what to do. We discussed what it might be for a time and theorized it might be plans for something. This was real secret agent material! We were all excited and closed the curtains and turned out the lights. I even turned down the brightness on the KV-5000 monitor I had at that time. Read that as 5" Sony Trinitron portable TV. I unplugged and air-gapped my MicroModem. We plugged the disk in and it turned out to be simply another game. One that I played there at the store and was planning on buying. I'm pretty sure it was Phantoms Five. I still have the disk, I'd have to check. Apparently the guy at the computer store made me a copy that I could "discover later". It was a bit of a letdown because the mystery of the red dot was over. But we played it for a while and then more tomorrow. It was however pretty cool to have discovered it this way with some earlier clues. Kind of like a real-life text adventure.

 

The guy wanted to know how we discovered it and he said he was testing out a story for a new adventure game and wanted to see how realistic it could be. In reality he probably wanted to add some excitement to my sorry existence.

 

But you see, that is the sort of interchange kids should be having with their computers. Not these shit-ass smartphone games that do nothing except encourage and take advantage of addictive behaviors.

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

[Andromeda Stardust]

Gaming, more than ever, needs to be consumed in moderation. And your poison must be chosen with great care these days. I limit my entertainment software purchases to $500 or less each year. And it isn't a difficult thing to do because I only get 1 or 2 titles in that year. Or like I said earlier I get some DLC for X-Plane.

 

[...]

 

But you see, that is the sort of interchange kids should be having with their computers. Not these shit-ass smartphone games that do nothing except encourage and take advantage of addictive behaviors.

Epic read. Thanks for sharing.

 

I wish my childhood had been that fun fascinating. I had no firends and no Nintendo growing up in the 80s...

[Keatah]

Yup. The 70's and most of the 80's was a really good time to be be growing up. I heard the 60's were too, but I wouldn't know.

 

We had Star Wars and Space Shuttles and integrated circuits. James Bond, 6 Million Dollar Man, and all sorts of TV goodness to be rounded out and capped late-nite with VCS or Intellivision or some other 8-bit console/computer.

 

Well, I got to talking with a Ouya developer that turned to iOS apps. And he said the Ouya and other microconsoles were sort of a transition phase for him going from PC to iOS. Ouya wanted to do in-app purchases too, but couldn't because the reliable-connection-to-server wasn't there. With a smartphone you got wi-fi and your data package.

 

Anyways he said IAP (he thought) was done because no one wanted to pay the traditional $39.95 like we did in the old days. And that IAP was an effective form of anti-piracy.. We also talked about metrics. And how some games record every click and tap and that gets sent to a database so the developer can make changes to the game for more effective monetization. Things Ouya wanted to do but didn't have the infrastructure to do it with.

 

He said it's a race to the $0.00 price point. And to where you pay your way through a game. I also agree that big-production games can't happen on microconsoles or phones. Only the PC, Playstation, or Xbox.

 

Epic read. Thanks for sharing.

I wish my childhood had been that fun fascinating. I had no firends and no Nintendo growing up in the 80s...

So you make them now. And buy your classic consoles now, too. I only had a few buddies back then. Spent too much time playing with crazy electronics and geek stuff. Stuff "normal" kids didn't understand or had no interest in.

[Schizophretard]

I don't think it should count as a fail because from early on it was suppose to be out for only a year and it was out around double that. Maybe the OUYA 2.0 could count as a fail because it didn't make it out but since Razer bought OUYA and plans to put its software on the Forge TV some consider that kind of an OUYA 2.0. OUYA Everywhere is on some Chinese boxes and Razer plans on expanding that. They also plan on expanding it over here. Their servers are still online, the platform is going to a new device, there are plans for other devices, the platform still exists, and they sold 250,000 of them. It may have not been a PS4 smash hit but it is somewhere around the 2600's early start which took a few years to take off. For a brand new console company with only millions of dollars instead of billions they have done alright and now that they are owned by a company with billions of dollars there is some potential to do better.

 

There was also the goal of shaking up the gaming industry with new kinds of consoles and making the industry more open to indie developers. Just a few years ago Julie Uhrman saw something other than a phone running on Android. She thought up the idea of affordable open consoles running Android. Today, the BIG 3 are a little more indie dev friendly, Google created Android TV, there was the GameStick and M.O.J.O., there is the Nexus Player, the Forge TV, nVidia is on its third Shield console, Valve is working on Steam boxes, there are TVs with Android TV built in, so many Chinese Android consoles that I lost count, the Fire TV, etc. To me it looks like Julie was successful with that goal because it started with just her new kind of video game console and now there are many competitors filling in this new category of console style gaming. That kind of thing doesn't happen with a failed idea. However, a rocky start is exactly what you expect from a new idea.

[JamesD]

Was there ever an ad for the Ouya on TV or did the developer solely rely in the internet for marketing?

[AtariLeaf]

I paid $70 for a new one a couple years ago and I use it primarily for XBMC and some emulation. I can use a PS3 controller which works much better and for what I've gotten out of it in the last 2 years and what I'll continue to use it for down the road, I still don't regret getting it.

 

Eventually I'll replace it with something like the Nvidia Shield

[108 Stars]

Rejoice, OUYA fans. Not all is lost!

 

China brings you the OUYE!

 

Now where have I seen this look before... ?

 

http://z.jd.com/project/details/20791.html

 

[Shawn]

Rejoice, OUYA fans. Not all is lost!

 

China brings you the OUYE!

 

Now where have I seen this look before... ?

 

http://z.jd.com/project/details/20791.html

 

55cb029aNa9b0ccd0.jpg

 

PS4 looking console with an Xbone looking controller? The Famicom Clone God's would be pleased with this modern offering.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Rejoice, OUYA fans. Not all is lost!

 

China brings you the OUYE!

 

Now where have I seen this look before... ?

 

http://z.jd.com/project/details/20791.html

 

55cb029aNa9b0ccd0.jpg

What a knockoff. Ouya guts in a PS4 shell with an Xbox look-a-like controller. Al it needs now is a red plumber or a blue hedgehog for a mascot...

Edited August 16, 2015 by stardust4ever

[Mord]

What a knockoff. Ouya guts in a PS4 shell with an Xbox look-a-like controller. Al it needs now is a red plumber or a blue hedgehog for a mascot...

 

That'd risk trademark infringement tho. Best make it a red hedgehog to play it safe.

Edited August 17, 2015 by Mord

[akator]

Even before the Ouya hit shelves I noticed an increase in indie game marketing from Sony and MS. The Ouya may have failed as a console, but I think the Ouya Kickstarter lit a fire under the big 3 to take indie game development more seriously.

 

There has also been an avalanche of indie titles on Steam over the last year. There is a hint of that same oversaturation from the early 80s when 2600 games started selling for $1-5 each.

[Greg2600]

I got one from Gamestop several months after its release. I would grade it as a B-. The possibilities were high, but failed to deliver primary (as others have mentioned) due to hardware limitations and poor OS. The OS I felt was not good at all, and way too slow. The Ethernet adapter was a USB device, not integrated, and thus performed horribly even compared to Wifi. Often WIFI wouldn't even work unless I went into settings and re-initialized it. They should have released an upgraded motherboard, because the Tegra-II just wasn't powerful enough. I had a lot of issues using it as a media device (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) for a long time, both software and poor performance. On the positive side, it worked very well for Mame, and I actually liked the controller.

[Bill Loguidice]

Even before the Ouya hit shelves I noticed an increase in indie game marketing from Sony and MS. The Ouya may have failed as a console, but I think the Ouya Kickstarter lit a fire under the big 3 to take indie game development more seriously.

 

There has also been an avalanche of indie titles on Steam over the last year. There is a hint of that same oversaturation from the early 80s when 2600 games started selling for $1-5 each.

 

I think it was the other way around. Indie gaming was a force well before the Ouya. The Ouya was just one product/service of many designed to take advantage of that.

 

I do agree with your other comment, though. The market is indeed oversaturated with games of all types and there are countless bundle sites (Bundle Stars, Humble Bundle, etc.) that make amassing large quantities of games for very little money quite easy. With that said, the market is bigger than ever, so at least we're in no danger of a crash. Videogames are here to stay.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I think it was the other way around. Indie gaming was a force well before the Ouya. The Ouya was just one product/service of many designed to take advantage of that.

 

I do agree with your other comment, though. The market is indeed oversaturated with games of all types and there are countless bundle sites (Bundle Stars, Humble Bundle, etc.) that make amassing large quantities of games for very little money quite easy. With that said, the market is bigger than ever, so at least we're in no danger of a crash. Videogames are here to stay.

Not crash per say, but oversaturation in the Steam, Android, and iOS markets is making it very hard for indies to get noticed. Good business for the shop owners, but bad for the small developers. And the smorgasbords of games you get from sales, humble bundles, etc, after the marketplace gets their 30% or whatever cut, leaves little to the game developers. There appears to be less clutter on the big three platforms by Nintendo, MS, and Sony, making it easier to find good indie titles, and much much less of the free-to-play, pay-to-win microtansaction BS that you find on Android and iOS. The majority of indie titles on the big three consoles, whether they feature free playable demos or not, have a one-time unlock fee.