[I’m fairly certain this is the correct place to post this, please correct me if I am wrong]
As an Indie developer working on a Unity game with the hopes of releasing for OUYA in the near future, I am needless to say quite excited about the little rubiks-cube-sized console. But I tend to see a lot of negativity surrounding the console, despite the
For starters, the technical specs are usually the first point of contention. In a nutshell, the OUYA will have about the same processing power as the Nexus 7 (and the same storage capacity as the cheapest model, as well). It’s Tegra3 will be overclocked, as well as optimized to run on constant power instead of a battery source, but otherwise it’s the same chip.
And people generally say “But the OUYA doesn’t have nearly enough power to compete with the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, let alone whatever’s coming next”.
And they would be correct. The OUYA cannot compete with the Xbox 360 or the PS3. It’s a good thing the OUYA was never meant to compete.
The OUYA does not provide an alternative to the three console giants. It provides something entirely different, in the same way that the Xbox isn’t nearly powerful enough to compete with gaming PCs but doesn’t need to as it provides something else.
The OUYA stands to be far more innovative to make up for the lack of power, both in design of it’s marketplace (including a free playable component will be a requirement for all games in the market, so players can easily judge whether to buy a game or not by playing a free trial) and in the openness of development (no big licensing contracts or expensive developer kits).
Another point people bring up is that OUYA is built on Android. “Why not just plug my phone into my TV?” they say.
And there are two very good reasons why OUYA is better than just plugging in a tablet. One, because your phone actually has to work twice as hard to output video to the television (it now has to copy the framebuffer to two output sources instead of just one) but the OUYA will only have to output to a single source, and two because games on the OUYA will be specifically designed from the ground-up to work on the OUYA (including OUYA gamepad controls), whereas games for Android are designed for touchscreen support (and any gamepad support is either accidental or an afterthought).
Additionally, OUYA is superior to a normal Android device where fragmentation is concerned. There won’t be a need to support 500 different models of OUYA made by 20 different manufacturers. There will only be one. In this regard, even if OUYA comes out with updates on a regular basis it will still be much closer to iOS in terms of ease of device support.
And on another point, OUYA is superior to mobile devices in general where multiplayer is concerned. While mobile devices tend to be limited by data plans (and in practice some can be quite slow in terms of internet speed), the OUYA will be connected straight to your Ethernet, and will be far closer to traditional consoles in terms of internet performance.
In closing, I think the OUYA will succeed in the same way many indie games succeed, for the same reason people pay for Minecraft or The Binding Of Isaac. These games don’t sport the bleeding-edge graphics techniques of the AAA giants, but what they do provide is something new, something innovative. In the same way, OUYA does not have the power of it’s counterparts, but instead provides something innovative and different.
Should the OUYA be a success, and I do think it will be, I think it has a good future. I believe we can expect future iterations to grow in power and capability. I’m excited about the prospects.
Thoughts?
