Seems good but then there is the 6 month exclusive which I think is really going to be an anchor on your kickstarter campaign, not to mention anyone not in the UK, US is screwed but still interesting, if you can raise at least 50k they will match it (up to 250k).
Can’t believe no one else commented yet! This is pretty amazing news. Dealing with other publishers means wayyy harsher terms for any type of funding.
A very interesting way to attract publicity and attract developers, that’s for sure.
The only thing that makes or breaks this for me is being able to give a non ouya version of the game to kickstarter backers on release.
6 month exclusivity will basically be read by people as “ouya only!” and that will really really cut into potential backer pool (and on kickstarter, that means kissing your campaign goodbye…since it will be harder to get news coverage…harder to get people excited about it…and just harder all around).
If you can give backers a special copy of the game (for like pc, mac, linux) then that solves all those issues and the backers are happy, ouya is happy, and developer is happy 
I think I could hold off on putting The Hero’s Journey on phones for six months… [/shameless plug and statement of intent]
But you don’t just get the money, its like 25% after funding is reaches, 50% when the game launches and 25% after 6 months or something like that. Still awesome though.
If the OUYA team elects to generate noise for the contest than the campaigns could get a lot of traffic normally and significantly beyond the reach of indies. It could be good depending on how OUYA goes about it.
I emailed them on this same issue. Doubt I’ll hear anything back but we’ll see.
I also mentioned that 50,000 is a lot for some games. Some are only looking for like 10,000 so maybe the can split it up so that everyone has a chance and not just 4 heavyweights come and take it all. Along with some other suggestions.
Can’t hurt to try.
I’d like to see this thing get a decent foothold in the market but so far they keep making missteps like shipping of units. etc.
Great idea though.
Yeah I was going to say you could try raising say 25k and then saying one of your stretch goals is to do the ouya deal and you will be able to add so much more content (3x or whatever).
I’ll give credit to the OUYA marketing team for consistently keeping their product in the news, but this endeavor doesn’t make much sense to me. Having a successful Kickstarter campaign is hard enough… limiting it to a platform that has a user base that is currently as small as the OUYA seems impossible (depending on the funds trying to be raised of course).
The sentiment is nice, but it seems slightly naive to me. They should’ve been pushing much harder over the last year to get exclusives. This feels like too little too late.
Unity + OUYA is a no brainer with regards to either porting existing games to the platform or including OUYA as one of the launch platforms. They should’ve contacted every single successful Unity game developer (mobile or otherwise) over the last year and given them an incentive to port their game to the platform. Given the current selection of games atm it doesn’t look like they tried that hard at this approach.
Good points Ethan,
They may also have attracted more developers world-wide if they weren’t limiting themselves to US/UK developers only through Kickstarter.
I think they are looking for heavyweights though. They want a few strong titles (exclusives) to really put the face on Ouya indie gaming. By having the qualifier be a decent sized kickstarter, they are basically (very wisely) having the public filter out submissions for the funds. If you are popular enough and have a good enough game to raise 50k+… then you are probably the type of game ouya is going to LOVE to feature as an exclusive.
The same for if you hit the 250k+ mark. If you go that high on kickstarter, then the game must have a pretty good following and your team must have done an amazing job getting the word out on kickstarter…so…again, completely worth it for Ouya to want an exclusive. Even if that means only 4 very strong indie games till the budget is used up, that is still pretty good from ouyas point of view.
It just all comes down to the issue of backer versions or not. Without that, it just kills the chance for a strong campaign. Kickstarter is hard enough to raise decent amounts on its own (and as time passes, it is only becoming more and more difficult).
While it makes sense to go for the big fish you also have to have the little fish.
The system is not in the hands of people yet for whatever reasons. If there were more units out then I’d say that would be a great strategy. Like Nintendo putting out Legend of Zelda. But if they put Zelda out before the system was even in people’s hands then it might not have the same impact,
But if you have a lineup of say 15-20 games vs. 4 it gives you more to use as a showcase. Like when systems come out and they try to have enough launch titles.
So say they get 4 Legend of Zeldas. It looks like mostly developers have the system and not many of the public. That doesn’t help the cause. May sell a few more systems but not where it makes Ouya somewhat of a gamechanger. Won’t completely change the game but you know what I mean.
Now if you have Zelda, Mario, Metroid, ran out of Nintendo game names…it might make it more attractive.
That’s just my view. Especially when you’re making it exclusive to a system which has some serious ground to make up with the failed launch and all that.
The thing is… even 50k or 100k budgets are pretty little fish.
Right now the ouya is filled with baby fish. Lots of mobile apps ported over or quick games done in a month or two. While those are fun for a little bit, they aren’t enough to really dig into.
They need something a little more substantial. They obviously will never have big fish (the many many million productions and cutting edge games). They mighttt eventually get some medium fish (a couple million budgets, a smallish sized studio, but a studio of that size isn’t going to be exclusive to Ouya). But right now their best bet are small fish (so, a tiny budget, 100k? 200k?) and some games that take a bit of work to get done.
Games like Braid, Bastion, Fez, or all the other major indie titles weren’t made that cheap. They took years of full-time with a small team to do with pretty substantial budgets (hundreds of thousands). That is what they want, they want a meaty indie game with a budget and idea to really hold out as the ouya star… to put a face on the console (at conventions as the game gets closer to release) and draw people in.
Makes perfect sense, and it’s a risk mitigation that really does need to be in place. If you give the developers all of the money and then the game doesn’t ever get finished for whatever reason there’s still a wad of cash available for someone else to get a go. And as long as you’re doing your job as a developer you could take the contract to a bank and use it to get a loan - so the money is available to you, but you’re the one taking the risk instead of Ouya.
This seems pretty ridiculous, if you can get 50k of funding for an OUYA exclusive (or at least a 6 month exclusive), then it seems extremely likely you could get more than 100k of funding for a multi-platform release.
Yeah. Buying exclusives with production cash makes sense, and is what the other console manufacturers do - but linking it to Kickstarter is not a great idea.
Maybe they’re reasoning that the 60k backers they had for their own Kickstarter will fund these other ones - that’s 60k people who bought an OUYA and so won’t be put off by the idea of a game being OUYA-exclusive (or will even be encouraged by it being specifically for them). However, the decision to support something like a games console is very different to the decision to support a particular game. The former is all about potential - it’s easy to tell yourself “I’m sure someone will make something that I like for the console, so I’ll get on board.” The console is a means to an end; people didn’t back OUYA because they really fancied having a shiny grey cube next to their TV. By contrast, the games are the ends - if you don’t look at a game and see something you want to play (or something you think you’ll want to play given a bit more dev time) then you won’t back it. So while there might be 60k OUYA players in total, only a fraction of them will support any given game.
That said, looking over the successfully-funded projects from the past two months that would qualify for this (i.e. funding target $50k or higher), it looks like raising $50k takes about 1500 backers (making for an average of about $30 per backer). So that’s 2.5% of the OUYA owner base. If OUYA are proactive about informing their install base, I guess I can see that working for a number of games.
^ This
Sadly (or not) I live in Brazil. No Kickstarter for me yet.
You are right, there are a lot of baby fish and several ports.
That’s why I was thinking the fund should be spread out. 4-5 big fish will get some attention.
To me it would seem like they need a lot more medium fish. Like 10-20 good games and not just whales.
Who knows.
But the exclusive thing may hurt
Getting people to back it.
But if they can get the Ouya community behind pledging then maybe it works for those trying to get funding.
They did take my email with some suggestions and CC it to someone else who I assume is running the contest.
I even threw out an idea to breakdown the contest or add to it.
Categories for big, medium and small fish.
Or expand the fund to 2M so you have 4 big ones then split the rest for smaller games.
Ouya games aren’t going to be AAA. But if you give people more to choose from then it helps with selling the system.
I could be wrong and it takes one mega fish.