Reasons why OUYA is a bad idea (at best)

There are naysayers for every idea. For new ideas there are more of them than when the ideas are established.

Every new product sucks. All of them. Some suck less. But the good ones improve with time.

I do not want to be part of a community that rallies against people trying to do great things with passion and change the status quo.

To me as a gamer and a guy who learned to do basic HTML as a pre-teen because he loved games and learned to hack at games with others far more experience than me this seems like an absolutely brilliant idea. If I were 13 again, I would be figuring out how to build games for OUYA if for nothing else than to be cool among my group of friends.

This comment comes from the gut and is not as analytical as some of my others but this post does not belong here.

OUYA team, I salute you. I don't care about the shortcomings of your initial product, I think your idea is sound and it seems there are thousands of people who seem to agree.

"1. android game list not compatible" : There are several apps on Android which enable games working with touchscreen only to be translated to physical controls by simulating touch pressure at precise points on the screen. Of course, this wouldnt work for Angry birds of game such as that, but there are a number of games for which this approach will work.

"2. The Android Game Library is Extremely Lackluster" : Yeah, maybe. But apparently there's some significant profit happening from a bunch of game creators, if not they would have stopped making games for Android a long time ago.

"3. Indies Will Not Fill the Void" : Why not? We have seen Braid on Ubuntu store even though it's a tiny portion of the market for games. There will be support from Indies. Porting something to the OUYA will be something fairly easy since the hardware is standard and the environment is already one people are familiar with. Cost of porting will be very low, I believe.

"4. The Userbase Problem" : They already solved this partly by : - adopting Android and therefore benefiting from Android market games - ensuring ports would be easy to make with standard hardware and environment, as my previous point. - and it seems, at least from Kickstarter, that there is some strong market interest for it, at least for a niche market.

"5. Some Things Just Don't Scale" : Author focuses on online capabilities, but just like on other consoles, you dont need online to enjoy great single player games like Limbo or Braid.

"6. Games are Moving Away From the TV" : Yeah, so what? There will still be always a market for TV-games. It's not like everyone is going to stop playing games on a big screen. There will be a market for it. Noone is ever considering that the games' market will be 100% mobile in the years to come. It may be decreasing because of the old business model as well, and the lack of innovation on home-based consoles.

"7. Android Specs Move too Fast" : Yeah, and so do hardware specs for PCs, yet games usually support a wide range of hardware capabilities, to be able to run in different resolutions and different processors, while still remaining playable. I don't see the big deal there. And nothing prevents them for updating the OUYA every 2 years or something while still keeping game compatibility, something impossible with current consoles.

I can't believe someone claiming to be a developper in the game industry wrote that post. Seriously.

1. A lot of games already support the Sony Experia Play gamepad layout which is extremely similar to this controller. I own that phone, there are plenty of games. This is just plain wrong.

2. Nonsense, plenty of fantastic games. Maybe not XBOX 360 / PS3 level of library, but is that necessary for success? I think not.

3. Yeah, there's junk, but there are also a lot of gems. So what, that's what ratings are for. Plenty of crap available on all game systems. This isn't competing on having specific games, but being an open platform. Expensive dev-kit not required. People actually like that, even if they don't use it. I love low-budget indie games. Lots of other people do, too.

4. Android already has great games. The games are already there, or trivially easy to port. A lot of developers added support to the Sony Experia Play after the fact when that came out. There's a good chance all those games will work on day 1 on OUYA.

5. No real compelling argument here. Android is an open system for networked games, they can work however they work. What's not economically feasible about games running their own servers or having multiple competing server services. These already exist in the PC game world.

6. Well the success of current consoles suggest that lots of people still do (and will continue) to game in their living rooms staring at their giant HD screen. I do.

7. Specs moving too fast? The XBOX 360 is dramatically "behind" in specs (not to mention the Wii), but as we already know, the tech specs of game systems aren't really much of a limiting factor in creating enjoyable experiences.. Hell, lots of people love games made for radically out-of-date consoles. Who is going to be writing games in 2 years for Android that doesn't run on current best-in-class android devices? Idiots, that's who.

8. We'll see...

Maybe that is too abstract, I'll reword it. A startup's job is to overcome challenges and create the non-obvious.

Each of those 'reasons' are just challenges that OUYA will have to overcome to succeed. The reasons do not make OUYA a bad idea, but rather a hard idea.

The bigger fear to my mind is that despite taking all the money, they'll somehow never ship a product. Certainly, they are not obliged to by the terms of Kickstarter. I'm sure they will, though.

Though even if everything else fails I'll still enjoy it as a $99 media streamer.

However, I'm not sure it is all the reasons outlined by the article.