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Comment by JiPi | Hacker News Reader

I would be curious to see how Ouya will fit in there, yes Android is supported, but at what point will Ouya be supported or not by Unity 4?

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How about never? The Ouya is a pig-in-a-poke at best. There's nothing compelling about it that you couldn't do with an ARM evaluation board (in fact, it's more limited), the average console gamer opinion regarding it is 'meh' and it will be obsolete the moment it arrives as what you can buy for $100~ in the ARM SoC space is getting crazier every minute.

The Mali-400 on http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph... is already posting better benchmarks than the Tegra3 on the Ouya and the CPUs are the same core, this one slightly lower clocked. Sure the price is a bit higher than the Ouya for a dev board, but that's something you can buy right now. And they're only going to be better and cheaper by the time the Ouya hits, which if I might remind is still five months away if everything goes to plan. Might as well be eternity at the rate cellphone hardware evolves.

Really, all they've done is sold a case and gave us some simple interface mockups. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ouya_software is completely underwhelming and resembles the total lack of commitment other DOA consoles like the NGage had going for them.

You can expect Asia to be cranking out a new Ouya-like every few months. It's the software stack on these devices that is significant, as the hardware is now practically free. Hell, it's even open source: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ *

(* Mali-400 GPU still not fully reverse engineered. As usual, GPUs are the FOSS barrier -- still, there's hope: http://limadriver.org/)

There is rather a big difference between a board and a consumer product. Most people are not keen on building their own system from scratch - and so far there isn't another 99$ game console out which is pretty much what OUYA seems to be about. Not to mention a console specific software stack. The fact that there is really hardware already around for that price makes me rather optimistic that OUYA isn't just the dream that never can come true which was my biggest fear for it so far (although I worry more about it's software stack).

Maybe there will be Asia clones ones it's out and a success, but so far there aren't. Someone has to be first...

And if it can get even cheaper in the long run with that hardware - that's also not exactly something speaking against it.

You got maybe a point with the games, but even there I'm not too worried. I don't need lots of good titles for a console - give me a handful of fun titles and I'm fine. Even playing supertuxracer on TV would already be enough fun for me to consider getting it :-)

You don't seem to understand that Android already is first. This is a $100 Android box with an 'app store of its very own!' and not much beyond that. We've already got Android and it's not difficult to make a similar enclosure. We've already got better hardware! The cost of porting from Ouya to other Android consoles in general is almost assuredly trivial to possibly zero depending how lazy they are about their software stack (i.e. no real reason to deviate from typical Android practices). All they have to differentiate themselves with is what they've added to Android and so far it looks like 'not much'. There's no reason for exclusivity on Ouya.

No, it's not a $100 Android box - it's a 100$ Android console. And I don't know any other Android system specifically designed for that so far. You don't keep your mobile phone or tablet plugged in to your TV and neither do you plug in a game controller into either of them usually. Also generally tablets do not mainly care about improving performance specifically for games, which mean given the choice of faster 3D or improving other hardware parts a typical tablet will not go for 3D. And yes - easy porting games to/from other Android systems is one the big selling points. If you think a computer is a computer then there is pretty much no point for ever buying a game console, nearly everyone has a more powerful PC in the house already.

Presumably after they show some signs of actually shipping the thing.

Yes, yes, I'm a curmudgeony and perennial Kickstarter skeptic - but what other stance can you take when a team that has never shipped any consumer electronics before promise to ship a profoundly game-changing piece of hardware on an extraordinarily aggressive schedule, at a shockingly low price?

The price is realistic: http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/pages/Low-End-Google-N... gives a BOM cost for the Ouya sans controller at around $75. Add a year's worth of deflation, and it should be around $50. No, they're not making any profit at $99, but they hope to make that up on game sales and later sales to those who missed the Kickstarter. The point is that they're not losing money. A normal manufacturer would have to spend millions in advertising to get the exposure Ouya did.

The only thing that's hard about the schedule is that they're a new manufacturer and need to build relationships with all of their suppliers. NVidia would have given them a reference design that they could almost use unchanged.

I was under the impression that they have in fact shipped consumer hardware (nothing especially elaborate -- I think they do bluetooth speakers for iPod/iPhone).

Ouya is just stock android plus APIs for the controllers and UI. It will probably support Android games with little or no modification.

As I understand it, the only departure from standard Android UIs is that there's a sort of in-game menu, and games may need to be modified to support that.

The Unity people specifically endorsed the Ouya Kickstarter by saying that Unity will support the Ouya through their Android publishing.

Not sure to understand why I was downvoted here...?

Because no one on HN actually believes the Ouya is anything more than vaporware, despite their announcement of having working hardware in hand and initial units in manufacturing.

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