OUYA Founding Team Member And VP Of Product Development Departs | Hacker News Reader

OUYA Founding Team Member And VP Of Product Development Departs

techcrunch.com

25 pointsminimaxir16 comments

I haven't seen any outstanding reviews for the ouya. Can we hear about the system from someone that invested in the kickstarter? Super curious on what the expectation was and what the reality is.

More software is slowly making it's way onto it. I only own a Wii and the Ouya and my friends have actually enjoyed some of the multiplayer games (Bomb Squad and Tower Fall). It's getting used several times a month when they come over. They are simple but fun games, kind of retro, not overly complicated like games of now.

I was one of the first 100 backers of the Kickstarter. I'm an indie game developer myself, though I wasn't backing it to develop for the system. My experience has been that it has been mismanaged from early on, and the product is sub-standard at best. The software is steadily getting better, but it is still lacking many areas. The highly touted controller is just a mess, and there's no software that's going to fix that. We hooked it up at our office in the break room, and needless to say, it almost never gets touched.

I was an early backer as well. The controller really ruined the whole thing for me. After all the hype it was such a let down. I lost faith in anything else they could provide even though I do enjoy a couple games on the system.

The promise was that the bloated console industry was ripe for low end disruption akin to what the ipad had done to pc sales. The 2012 Tegra 3 hype train was also full steam ahead and it's easy to promise your games will look awesome on kickstarter.

The reality was that console makers were not bloated -- they were already selling at cost and the Ouya was just another console and a bad one. The games library wasn't compelling and new top Android games were already incompatible with the underwhelming Tegra 3. Performance on the whole was bad, PS2 quality. It was certainly cheap at $100 but with the hands down superior Wii at $150 (and probably somewhere behind most users tvs) it just wasn't cheap enough.

On top of all this is was marketed exclusively as a console when it should have been going after people buying the Apple TV.

The potential is still there though and maybe Ouya has enough cash to regroup and be the company to deliver a compelling product. This news doesn't exactly bode well on that front though.

People do play games on their phones. The selling point of the OUYA was that you can play games on hardware from (at the time) $400+ phones on a $100 console that came with a real controller. And developers could target a single hardware platform and run it all-out without worrying about battery life.

Openness was a major point in favor, which the Wii doesn't have. It doesn't look like anyone is taking advantage of it though.

In some European countries you can get €400+ mobiles at €1 if you go for a two year contract.

Many of such mobiles do have HDMI connections and bluetooth gamepads available.

Then there are lots of cheap USB pens running Android that you can just plug into your TV.

So there isn't much a Ouya can offer against these options.

Ouya doesn't lock you into a contract, so the prices aren't really comparable. HDMI connections on phones are a lot slower than dedicted screens due to buffer copying - MHL 3.0 is supposed to fix that. Do the cheap USB pens have comparable graphics, USB expandability, and look as good as the Ouya? :)

> Ouya doesn't lock you into a contract, so the prices aren't really comparable.

Average Joe/Jane don't care about it as they already have the phone anyway.

> Do the cheap USB pens have comparable graphics, USB expandability, and look as good as the Ouya? :)

Quite a few to choose from, both cheaper and more expensive than the Ouya:

http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/overview/0413084/Android-Mini-PCs

Maybe their GPUs aren't at Ouya's level, but they are good enough for most Play Store titles.

Yeah, I think a lot of the momentum was driven by people who wanted to put XMBC on it, but that didn't mesh with the message they wanted to project.

And the rest is an interesting study in how hard it is to jumpstart an ecosystem, especially after casual games have been driven to a price point that requires a user base two orders of magnitude bigger to have a chance.

The OUYA is a passable way to run SNES, GBA and Genesis emulators on your TV. I got mine second hand from someone who might have been interested in developing for it and then decided not to.

It is, as long as you keep in mind that the hardware is weak and the OUYA controller is complete trash.

Complete and utter trash. It was not usable by any stretch of the imagination. Press a button and half a second later Link swings his sword. Pack up Ouya and send it back to Amazon.

I think is ridiculous you can't see a Linkedin profile without an account.

It's cool, most of the time you can't see a Linkedin profile with an account also.

You can see public profiles for many people even without an account. In this case: http://www.linkedin.com/in/muffi

I think TechCrunch should have linked to this instead of to the non-public profile. Alternatively, LinkedIn should redirect to the public profile if you're not logged in.

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