Without A Buyer, The Ouya Console Is Dead
Ouya, the company behind a promised revolution in gaming development and distribution, is in trouble. A memo sent to investors and advisors from Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman notified recipients that the company had failed to meet one of its investor’s conditions and renegotiation has failed. Without a buyer by the end of the month, the Ouya console will most likely be dead.
Fortune magazine ran with the confidential email from Uhrman detailing the Ouya console maker’s trip to the auction block. Series A funding, in which a company’s first round of venture capital is acquired, took place in 2013 and raked in an impressive $15 million on top of the $8 million secured through its runaway Kickstarter campaign. An unspecified amount was later raised with TriplePoint, and $10 million more recently from China’s Alibaba.
The dream of the Ouya console was a big one. It would have upended traditional publishing for AAA video games by offering a $99 Ouya console capable of delivering compelling games on the open Android platform. Like most things that sound too good to be true, the Ouya console generated an unparalleled amount of hype, stemming from gamers who found an identity in rebelling against the “evil” AAA publishers. Here was a console that would be cheap with free games, open to all developers. It would show the world once and for all that a $399 price tag and $59 games were too much.
They meant well.
Once the hype died down and the first reviews starting appearing, the careful reservations from columnists like Erik Kain at Forbes became warning signs and eventually the throes of irrelevancy.
Many things led to the demise of the Ouya console, but many agree the key factor was the decision to use Android as the operating system, paired with hardware that was the same as smartphones and tablets available at the time of launch. A 1.7GHz quad-core A9 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage was featured in the launch editions of the console making it, as Engadgetcalled it, a “smartphone in a box with no display.”
Developers ported their mobile games to the console. Square Enix released Final Fantasy III on the platform as a port of the already available smartphone version. Other exclusives were released in hopes of galvanizing sales. In the end, the console’s very nature ended up working against it. Why play mobile games on a TV instead of on your phone? The console is inferior to a PlayStation 3, so why would someone play a shooter on it?
Combined with a lack of revenue from the developers that invested in it, along with the emulators that quickly became popular (which the Inquisitr covered previously), the Ouya console fizzled out quickly.
The final nail in the coffin for the $99 console was the abandonment of the hardware in favor of a distribution platform, as the Verge reported in 2014. Julie Uhrman stated, “What makes Ouya is not the physical hardware, but the fact that it is made for games built for a TV.” As the Verge rightly asked, “What is Ouya without its hardware?”
Android is an open system and, as a result, is heavily fragmented, which appeals to many. Developers must decide which range of hardware they are going to target and then support literally hundreds of hardware variations, as opposed to the closed iOS platform.
The Ouya promised a hardware standard with hopes that it would upset the giant video game console makers like Sony and Microsoft. Weak hardware, an anemic software launch library, and pie-in-the-sky thinking eventually led what many hoped would be a revolution in the gaming industry to a flash in the pan that many have already forgotten about.
“Our focus now is trying to recover as much investor capital as possible,” Uhrman wrote according to Forbes. “We believe we’ve built something real and valuable. I continue to read the tweets and emails of our fans who play OUYA every day, and our catalog is now over 1,000 apps and 40,000 developers. We have the largest library of Android content for the TV (still more than Amazon) — hells ya!”
[Image Source: Ouya]
