Final Fantasy comes to Ouya
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
This team is trying to disrupt a truly oligopolist market - I really hope they do it.
Give them a break on marketing announcement dissection at least until you see what they build.
Gamers seem to have backed this based on an idea that it's a $100 full fledged console. It is not. It is, at best, a tablet that hooks up to your tv and has a controller. At least as far as the hardware is concerned.
On top of that, their release timelines aren't even remotely realistic. March? They don't even have their online store prototyped yet. They have some UI mockups and that's it. Launching in March? Yeah right.
And then there's the issue with allowing the console to be fully open, using a hardware platform that is already having so many issues with piracy that developers are slowly being forced to release their games for free and supported with ads to make any money.
I have no doubt that if this system ever materializes, it will make an impact, but it's a long stretch to think you'll be taking delivery of this system in March and playing Final Fantasy 3 on it.
"That [controller] design is not final," I was told. "We are in a prototype phase and exploring several options."
"We know the hardware specifications, and are working with electrical and mechanical engineers to test the performance of the hardware. We have begun work on the user interface and software. We’ll pull all these pieces together and test how they fit, while we finalize the product."
It reminds me of that Kickstarter flashlight that's been in development for over a year[2]: they're not quite saying how little is done, and they'll be in over their head in no time. To me, every bit of marketing copy from Ouya seems willfully misleading.
[1] http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-reality...
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/527051507/hexbright-an-o...
With a big vision like this, it'd be concerning if everyone was just cheerleading them on and being yes-men.
The realistic prospect for a product success is rarely heavily scrutinized. And success rates are always statistically quite low.
Mr Charles raises some valid doubts about launch time. They're most certainly not a stretch - considering the tons of horror stories about launching hardware products we've seen on HN.
Let alone attempting to create a whole new market segment in a highly competitive environment - where even with success - making money might be difficult.
That's the problem. I'm not sure how a reasonable person can read the outright venom displayed in comment after comment all over the internet and then with a straight face say that it is somehow well intentioned. I don't know why so many people hate anything different that threatens the status quo. I guess it's just human nature. The phenomenon seems to manifest itself particularly in the consumer tech space though. The incumbents get praise heaped on them for doing little more than tweaking and renaming their e-mail service but let a group of people throw some pocket change at a video game console that isn't backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation and all hell breaks loose. I hope the Ouya succeeds if for no other reason than for the haters to have to wipe the egg from their faces. But who am I kidding? They'll just find some other underdog to kick.
For various reasons:
1) The idea hasnt come to fruition yet, so it can be shaped and molded with feedback. (unlike color or cuil which both hard-launched with a full product and strategy and no sense of reality)
2) People are talking about your company. peroid. Building something that noone cares about or only gets the odd "thats cool" is way worse than having pages of critiscm.
3) Knowledgable people are spending their time analyzing every part of your business. For free.
Once you get past the sensitivity to rejection/bad feedback which all entrepreneurs do in the first year, its not such a bad thing. Although obviously not a goal one should strive for.
Implicit in your statement is the assumption that "a tablet" is less capable then a dedicated console. Is that necessarily the case? Perhaps the aging console hardware still has an edge in blockbuster first-person shooters, but considering consoles generally render at 600p, I doubt the technical disparity is that considerable.
But even beyond that, the raw speed of the consoles is unlikely to be matched by one of these tiny integrated ARM devices for quite a while. The raw CPU speed may get there, though it absolutely isn't right now. But the graphics chips? Not a chance. On top of the fact that the integrated chips are flat out slower, they are also lacking a huge amount of features compared to dedicated chips. You need look no further than Open GL ES for iPad to see the major differences.
I don't have raw numbers but if someone were to provide them, you'd see a magnitude of power disparity.
And these were projects for things that are "dumb" objects. I don't expect the Ouya to be on time at all.
I just find it hard to understand that people want to buy products on just a guarantee from a team, without reading any type of real world reviews from other people
Most of the kick starters that I find are successful, are those which _already_ have a fully functioning prototype that people are able to use, work, play with - and the kickstarter is something that lets them do this at scale.
The kick starters that are for the R&D/Development almost never hit their targets - even for projects much less aggressive than this one.
Plus - the budget is tiny for all these sub-projects, particularly because they are going to have to pay for all these consoles out of it. It's a train wreck in the offing.
But (and I say this thinking about things other than Ouya) a game platform does not need all the things you list at the outset. That's like saying you need to create an EA in order to make games. If you can put together pieces to make hardware that will run a game successfully, you can have a start.
There is a vast gulf between homebrew and EA which is not very well exploited commercially.
Heck, just having a controller working in 8 months would have been a huge victory, controller + API + console in 8 months is what I would have targeted. Six months after that a developer platform. Six months after that a Downloadable (free) store. Six months after that a Store-for-Pay. And Six-months after that some AAA games available, like Minecraft or FF7. These are realistic goals, and would have avoid the certain disappointment when in March, Ouya doesn't have Quality Console+Controller+Store+Free-Demos+AAA Games.
Which, alas, I guarantee you it really, really won't.
For example, this particular news update about FF is misleading, as the version they're proclaiming to be exclusive is already available on iOS in the US(and can be played on a TV too), so they're adding caveats such as "on a console on the TV in the US".
A significant portion of the Kickstarter audience may not be knowing the above and might think that this is a big exclusive coming to the platform. The utter hype surrounding this is immense, and not much is ready. While this does not mean that they're going to fail, it sure is hard to execute and they need to show more before hyping the platform to raise even more money from the ordinary users.
Edit: There is more detail on this below, with some contrasting views for FF3, which I've never played.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_eni...
The game is a port of the DS remake to begin with, I doubt "coming to Ouya" is much more work than maybe adding controller support to the Android build.
It looks like SquareEnix just released FFI also.
I understand that they want to drum up support and give a positive impression so that more people will join in, but a little more honesty I suspect would go a long way.
I guess they're doing paid games now: "But that’s not the end of it: We’re promising to deliver Final Fantasy III like you’ve never seen it before – Hironobu Sakaguchi’s third installment in the role playing game franchise will be updated to exploit OUYA’s high-definition resolution in glorious graphic detail. For those of you who are new to Final Fantasy, we’ll offer a free demo so you can give it a go!"
ARM graphics performance improves 2x every 12 months, so 4x after 2 years. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Tegra 4 brings that much improvement alone over Tegra 3, since Tegra 3 was a pretty small chip compared to competition, even at 40nm (therefore weaker), and Tegra 4 is rumored to have 64 cores (5.3x more than Tegra 3). I would much rather like it to come with Tegra 4 or some other 2013-ready CPU/GPU than more RAM.
Even for AAA titles like Battlefield 3, the difference in 64 players in a pc to 24 players on consoles according to the developers, was mostly because of the lack of memory.
1GB is huge for a game console. Just for comparison the PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.
People seem to have forgotten on of the major reasons why the PS1 became so successful.
It wasn't it's superior hardware or software or numbers of colors. It was the simple fact that it could be modded and thus allowed you to play games for free.
I personally like Ouya, but realistically, the second part of your sentence should be "to everyone else this is a gaming platform that they haven't heard of". Only the nerds really know about Ouya, Joe Q. Public probably won't hear about it unless the nerds who bought the first wave can make it go viral.
The PS1 was successful because it was put out in large numbers by Sony, not because of the relatively small modding scene.
They are going to have to find something more than ports from other systems to wow people.
For these properties, they charge premium-based prices. For iOS, they don't make them universal...which as a business decision is fine, if unpopular. But they delay the iPad versions for months for inexplicable reasons, but I guess there will be fans who'll pay another $10+ for the new version.
So I don't think the porting of FF3, widely considered one of the worst of the early Final Fantasies, to be much more than another cash-in by Square.
* as cdr noted, the language to market this Ouya port is a bit hyped and misleading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317397
I can't directly disagree with your statement that they "actually put quite a bit of work into it," because they did produce new 3D assets, which is a non-trivial task, and the localization had to be done from scratch since it was the first time Final Fantasy III had ever been released outside Japan. However, it certainly didn't feel like a game that that got a lot of tender loving care; it felt like a cash grab predicated on the assumption that people would buy anything tied to the Final Fantasy brand.
There are no L/R buttons, so you need to be able to swipe between characters. It's a mobile game and the screen is smaller so zooming into secrets is needed, and you need to be able to tap on enemies to select or else you'll just automatically attack the first person in the field.
I don't exactly agree with GP but I do understand where he's coming from. I enjoyed FFIII for iOS and got quite far into it, but it's hardly a touch based game. 99% of the time you're manipulating a virtual joystick.
They will only release a remake when:
A) The money is needed/correct B) They make a better game in their view. With I suppose, overwhelming success.
You can probably expect to see II and IV on Android within a year if they continue to sell well, but probably not V or later until they're ported to a portable game system first. I know there were reports of preliminary work on V/VI for DS but nothing beyond that.
Also, to clarify, Chrono Trigger was Square's opus :)