OUYA Is On Death's Door And Needs To Find A Buyer ASAP

News & General Discussion
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I worked at a digital agency that did work for OUYA for about a year and a half. I got to build the original version of their games page that displays info about all the games on the system (It’s since been tacked onto and hacked apart by the company who succeeded us, who loves this paintbrush aesthetic and videos everywhere… not a fan of it, personally).

It was a very frustrating experience to work with OUYA. They never missed an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot. We would make recommendations (for example, with their Free the Games Fund initiative, we strongly recommended against the $50k minimum asking price for projects, and I personally begged them not to send their disappointed Kickstarter backers $13.37 as an apology) that they would ignore or argue strongly against, and when they went through with their plans, they backfired just as we said they would.

I think the root of their problems was the fact that they had no clue who their core demographic actually was. The idea of getting your game into living rooms around the world so easily was a great opportunity for hobbyist and small-time indie devs. It could have been like the minor leagues for developers to be vetted before making it big. But instead of embracing this, OUYA tried marketing themselves as direct competitors to Microsoft and Sony, which they clearly weren’t. To make matters worse, their “Every game free to try” mentality created a consumer environment much like the mobile market space, and I think it only encouraged players to not spend money on games.

I still think there may be a market for something kind of like the OUYA. The idea of a true indie console not bound to the restrictions of big publishers would be a great way to discover new and interesting content. But I imagine it’ll take some different form, like a cloud-based service or something. And maybe it’s for the best that OUYA won’t be part of that next step, but instead serves as a reminder of what happens when you try to force something that isn’t happening instead of embracing your strengths and running with them.

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22

Its sad news… alas… I really wanted Ouya to become a bigger platform and be more mainstream, but it just remained too small. The hardware really holds it back, its way too under-performing to do anything really good. The likes of the new NVidia console at $200 or whatever with several times the performance looks more appealing now, though the pricepoint is less so. Ouya had all the markings of a good movement, indie-backed, indie-focussed, the peoples console and all that, being open to feedback from the audience, etc… but they rested too much on their laurels… they should’ve come out with Ouya 2 1 year after launch, they missed that opportunity. There is no momentum there, and with very poor audience numbers and little in the way of sales potential except for the very best games (and too many crap games) it just didn’t develop the way it needed to.

It would make a nice doorstop if it didn’t weigh so little… .maybe a paperweight? lol

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I wasn’t a ‘Ouyra’ believer, anymore than I’m a believer in 3D TV’s or the current generation of HMD’s (i.e. Oculus Rift, etc).

Gigi

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The Ouya did inflame my imagination, in ways that the Oculus Rift or 3D TV fads haven’t been able to do (guess what I think is going to happen to those two devices?) I mean, seriously - being able to write for a “console”!? That people play in a living room!? Holy crap, where do I sign!

…Then it launched, which was a disaster in and of itself. In addition to Ouya not knowing what in the Good Lord’s Green Earth they were doing, the monetization of games immediately dissuaded me from releasing anything for it - I’ve made more on making the game I was going to release on it, The Hero’s Journey, from releasing it as a free game on GameJolt and getting ad revenue, than I would have from the “mandatory free demo” setup in the Ouya market.

I waited and bided the market - and Ouya themselves - to see if it would change. It did not.

Ouya was a great experiment that failed due to poor logistics, and general incompetence. I hope the next runner up does a better job.

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1 year in, they still hadn’t gotten consoles to all their Kickstarter backers, so it would have been yet another kick in the teeth to them to release an OUYA2 while they still hadn’t gotten theirs. Now if they would have shipped those people the version 2, sure, but it wasn’t production of the consoles holding them up as much as it was their shipping partner.

On top of that, when they tried testing sales of a larger capacity system, people were flipping out about it and claiming to have been screwed over by buying the lower capacity one. It definitely didn’t help that they pissed off their initial backers and core audience so much that most of their customers were just waiting to jump on them any time they did… well, anything.

Ugh, that’s one of the things I hated most about the system! The weight of the 3 ft. HDMI cable was enough to pull it out of place! It’s like it wanted to just fall behind your entertainment center and be forgotten! :smile:

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Yes, I think this was a big part of the problem. OUYA could have made something of themselves by embracing the idea of being a scrappy underdog. Instead they seemed obsessed with becoming bigger than they could realistically achieve. What they really needed was some focused development efforts to help promote their platform. More titles like Towerfall, that played to the systems strengths while downplaying its weaknesses.

But by forcing their own ideas on developers, (like the required demo mode) they turned away a lot of the support that could have made it a more appealing platform.

I actually donated to the Kickstarter for OUYA, and I don’t regret it. I personally feel that OUYA already managed to serve its real purpose. Well, its real purpose for me, anyway. I wanted to prove the viability of a small-form gaming system with low specs. Now everyone and their dog are following step, culminating in the push towards Smart-TVs with micro-console capabilities. This is the future I dreamed of when I backed OUYA, and OUYA’s successful Kickstarter campaign was the beginning of this trend.

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This is the wrong attitude, and part of the reason why the OUYA tanked. Bigger and better is the opposite of what the OUYA was going for. Instead of embracing the minimalist nature of their platform, they got caught up in their envy of their larger competitors.

More powerful hardware and better graphics wasn’t what the OUYA needed. What they needed was a larger number of games that took advantage of the power that the system already had. Games with decent art but low power requirements, such as Towerfall, were a perfect fit for the OUYA. They needed more of that, not more graphically powerful titles.

The OUYA could have been textbook example of Gunpei Yokoi’s strategy of using inexpensive, dated technology to it’s greatest potential. Instead it’s become a cautionary tale of a company’s reach exceeding it’s grasp.

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Also, developers need to be able to make money on their games for there to be an ecosystem in the first place. The very first headlines about Ouya? “The most popular game, Towerfall, only made $3,000 in the first month of the platform’s public release.” A number of people - me included - stopped right there and walked.

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Boom! Says it all.
Gigi

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Honestly, that’s not the most important aspect. What’s really important is that developers need to have the freedom to do what they want with their creations. If that means selling them in the fashion that they want to sell them, then that’s what’s necessary.

Making money is important, but having different options is even more important. OUYA’s ecosystem failed to take that into account, thereby limiting the options of its developers. And it’s content that makes a system, not hardware. Again, a major point of the OUYA’s original design that was lost by its creators.

This is part of the reason why Steam continues to be such a dominant force in digital distribution. Valve has been very good about empowering the developers who release games on their system. They provide options, as well as numerous tools and services, and they take developer feedback seriously. The money that developers can make off of Steam is obviously important too. But the ability to make that money was built on top of a long history of Valve empowering developers. (and numerous other right-headed decisions)

This is also why the home consoles have been turning things around in the indie space. All of them have pulled their heads out of their butts and started communicating and working with smaller indie devs in a more effective manner. This change in attitude has also helped to erode the potential development support of systems like the OUYA.

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@RichardKain I’d argue that OUYA never even really supported independent developers all that well. Not when compared to the effort they went into courting established teams to try and seem like a “real” console. I was told that they paid a good bit of money for Telltale to bring The Walking Dead to OUYA… and it was like a year and a half after its initial release. Who wants to play The Walking Dead that hadn’t already played it on their PC, console, or phone/tablet?

There were a few sweethearts that OUYA courted (Matt Thorson of Towerfall) to try and get that killer app, but I believe even Thorson spoke out against the restrictings OUYA was trying to enact to keep his title exclusive to their platform. That’s not indie-friendly. That’s exactly the kind of behavior OUYA set out to revolt against.

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You’re right about giving developers choices. Part of what turned me off, was that they forced the “Free Demo” thing down any prospective Ouya developer’s throats. They gave me no option to just provide a hard sell…or much of any other option.

Still, though, the $3000 on the far and away most popular game on the platform was a red flag in and of itself. I interpreted it as proof that the people buying the console weren’t spending money on the games, and given the forced demo thing, it’s not really hard to see why.

It’s like the demo staff at a grocery store (source: me, in college, it’s what I did to help pay tuition) - when you teach people that they can get a free eat, they will go for the free eat, and not buy the thing you’re selling. Given enough time, they come to believe that the point of you being there is to distribute “free” food. My sales drastically improved when I stopped giving out samples - I went with a hard, direct sell. Guess what? Things improved, people stopped taking me for granted, management began giving me pats on the back for selling so much, I was slightly happier.

I feel a good paraphrasal of what you said, was “The financial output of a platform to developers isn’t as important as the choices for developers to manage their properties.” I’ll take the second part of what you say, without question. More choices for developers to work with are a Good Thing™, beyond any ghost of a doubt. But if you say that money isn’t as important to a platform, I’d beg to disagree, or that heading wouldn’t have been such a powerful force for so many developers, including me.

One speculation/concession I’d happily make, is if the first month had passed, Towerfall had made $3,000 USD, but we had more options to distribute, I think a few more people would have shrugged it off as a mere “slow start” - after all, the Ouya wasn’t widely known outside of indie circles (I can corroborate this, half of my friends and coworkers didn’t know Ouya was a thing, at all.) Merely spreading the word would have solved the problem by getting more people to write for it or buy the games. Had developers had more choices in the matter - as you say - eventually a “killer app” could have materialized, that led to the developer writing other titles. In that case, we would not be having this conversation, because it would not be a failed platform.

But, that didn’t happen; the system performed poorly in the initial month, developers had no choices, and Ouya themselves behaved like big babies (remember those times when they twitter-spammed developers to try to irritate them into writing for the Ouya?) As far as I’m concerned, they “just” screwed up, in most possible ways. I don’t count them as a cautionary tale in overreach, I count them as a strategy guide in “How Not To Conduct Business 101.” In fact, selling that would probably get them a reasonable sum of cash to stay afloat. They should try it.

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33

I would agree with that assessment. And that was part of their downfall. There were multiple different “identities” that they had to choose from. They chose wrong.

I have no rancor over the OUYA. I’m glad it happened. But I’m also not going to cry over it going away. I am confident that other opportunities will rise, and other intrepid teams will step up to fill the gap in the market that the OUYA leaves behind. In many ways, other companies already have.

Also, if anyone starts to hear about clearance sales on OUYA hardware, be sure to post about them. Once word of this potential sale gets around, it’s likely that any retail establishments still hanging on to OUYA hardware are going to look to dump their stock. I wouldn’t mind getting a few more OUYA units and controllers at clearance prices.

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I’m not saying you’re wrong about the money. Being able to make some decent scratch from your software is a big issue, and once some use-cases got out the results definitely did scare away a lot of potential developers. I’m just pointing out that the money wasn’t the root cause. It was just a natural extension of other bone-headed decisions.

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I think they managed to write the strategy guide on “Bone Headed Decisions.” I wonder what they’d title it?

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So true, but would never happen. I wanted them to just once admit a failure and apologize, but they constantly acted as if everything was going according to plan. With their core market being developers and other, rather savvy individuals, this was the wrong move. Most of their customers, I imagine, understood the industry well enough to recognize what was happening.

Oddly enough, a few months ago quite the opposite happened. OUYA stopped selling consoles on their site, and all their partnered retailers were out of stock. Used systems started popping up on eBay for as much as 50% over what a new system normally cost.

I managed to sell my console for $122. My buddy had to re-list both his (regular and white, special edition) due to non-payment, and by that point they were selling them again, so he got under retail value. Very interesting phenomena, though.

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“How We Screwed The Pooch: The OUYA Story”

“The Precipitous Drop Less Traveled: How To Steer Your Company Off A Cliff”

“Good Intentions: And The Road Paved With Them”

I won’t be selling my OUYA. It’s an original backer-unit, in mint condition, with all of the original boxing and inserts intact. And it is a permanent part of my extensive game collection. I wouldn’t mind acquiring some retail units cheap in order to use them for hobbyist projects. I’ve been meaning to build some new minimalist arcade cabinets, and the OUYA would be perfect for using as the guts of one of those.

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Yeah, I didn’t want to sell mine. But I have a terrible habit of collecting electronic things that I’ll “use someday” and never do, and I was cleaning house of some stuff and just jumped at the chance to turn my Ouya experience into a positive one.

Sad to think I made more money off my Ouya system than most developers did with their games on the platform…

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I thought about buying a OUYA but never got around to it. It seemed to be like the dream console of retro (and hobbyist) gamers such as myself. Will check on Amazon tonight and see if I can grab one. A secondary community driven market may well spring up and it could maintain a sort of cult following. Much like there are still people playing games on C64s and Amigas to this very day and new games continue to be released.

Oh and @AndrewGrayGames those samples are excellent. Not for sales you’re right but several times I needed a snack and those vendors sitting in-aisle with little tables with their samples provided that for me. Usually the stuff was quite delicious and for free too how could I not be happy?! :slight_smile:

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The only concern I’d have is the unknown of whether it will continue to function if OUYA shuts its doors. If their server running the store API is shut down, I’m not sure if console owners could even access their purchased games, much less download new ones.