Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

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Are all of you guys missing the whole point that this is on Adnroid? They specifically chose to build it on Android precisely because of this problem. You're not developing for a platform with OUYA users only. You're developing for the fastest growing platform in the world with over 1 million new devices per day.

And on top of that. If you add gamepad support (which will be trivial for most games, and those which are not won't even bother). And take additional 5 minutes to upload to the OUYA store. Now you're also supporting the OUYA devices, in addition to all other Android devices.

The OUYA is not just its own single thing. It's just a tiny part of a huge ecosystem. And this tiny part is helping shape the direction that the rest of the ecosystem is going. (meaning you'll see more gamepad-friendly games in the future) You can be sure that the OUYA won't be the only Android console-like device we'll be developing for. Many more will come to compete with it in the coming years.

One really big sign of how innovative this is. Is that even many of the HN cannot grasp what they're doing. Watching the critics argue with each other here, reminds me of watching the MPAA discuss anti-piracy measures. No offense intended :)

I would disagree that adding gamepad support for existing games will be "trivial" especially if you care about the game experience at all.

Changing the input type for a game in most cases fundamentally changes what the game is. It can also mean that the difficultly curve has to be adjusted significantly because things that used to be hard suddenly become easy and vice versa.

For a good example of this , look at the original Unreal Tournament on the PC. The maps on this game take huge advantage of the vertical space and allow for precision shooting over large distances thanks to the mouse.

Now look at popular FPS games on consoles, most use way less in terms of the vertical space and typically incorporate some form of aiming assist to make distance shots possible.

Having the OS based on android will provide some advantage is re-usable game code but I think this overstates the issues when it comes to porting to different platforms.

Jiggy, it's very clear from your posts on this thread that you are clueless about both game and android development. You jump from flawed argument to a different flawed argument after the first flaw is pointed out. You seem to be more worried about criticizing the ouya out of criticizing's sake, instead of being worried about the merit of your arguments. Why are you doing this? What is your motivation to continue with this?

I've already answered your argument in the very post you're replying to. I wonder if you're even bothering reading. Some games already support d-pad, others don't. For the ones that do, it will be trivial, the ones that don't, won't bother porting.

Thanks for the Ad hominem.

I often post on HN from somewhat of a devils advocate position (and assume others do the same), since that's more interesting than the sort of "+1 I love this!" type posts I see on other forums.

In reality of course I would love this console to succeed and in principle would prefer something like this to a closed console such as the XboX.

Regards the point about controls: The fact remains that the most popular games for android currently are designed around touch screen controls since the overwhelming majority of android devices out there are phones or tablets.

Sure , there are a few Android games that seemed to be designed for gamepads and were somehow shoehorned onto a touchscreen (the series of COD clone games who's name escaped me springs to mind). Sure, some of these could be salvaged into something playable on this console but I would think the difficulty would still need adjustment since people now have a proper gamepad rather than a touchscreen pad. Also I would doubt many of these games are particularly competitive with equivalent games for the XboX etc even with the controls fixed.

Historically having some impressive launch titles has been an important precursor to success for consoles. The combination of the release timescale combined with the lack of concrete information for developers means that it seems unlikely that such titles will appear in time.

In other words, whilst I personally love this idea, I have no idea how I would encourage less geeky friends to get one, saying "you can play the games that you can already play on your mobile phone" doesn't seem like it would cut it.

No, I get it's for Android.

But I'm interested to see if they can reach a level where games are targeted at the platform, not its OS. The fact that Android sold 50 times as many devices as they did yesterday kinda hurts them in some ways.

If all they do is run generic Android games, their store becomes completely pointless. As this seems to be how they're aiming to make money, it's not a moot point at all.

> You're developing for the fastest growing platform in the world with over 1 million new devices per day

Lots of users… very few willing to pay for anything

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