Razer Acquires Ouya’s Software, Tech and Dev Teams in All-Cash Deal | Hacker News Reader

Razer Acquires Ouya’s Software, Tech and Dev Teams in All-Cash Deal

techcrunch.com

80 pointswinterismute38 comments

More info is available at Polygon:

http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/7/27/9046895/razer-ouya...

The Techcrunch article linked in this article has a lot more details, including statements that sound a lot like "your Ouya console will be useless in 12 months - go get a Razer Forge box after that."

Why would one expect the usefulness of their Ouya console to change and be anything other than useless? (this is a joke at Ouya's expense, I am pointing it out because based on my past experience making jokes here someone will take this seriously and get all defensive about how great Ouya is)

Seriously though in 12 months Ouya will be 3 years old, I don't think expecting a company to actively support a piece of cheap (affordable for those that find the word cheap insulting) hardware for more than 3 years is a reasonable expectation. Ouya had already added the play store I thought (as pointed out below, I thought wrong), and so discontinuing support will probably amount to the Ouya store ceasing to exist and a lack of future patches. I mean its a device to play games mainly in a local manner, it will continue to be able to do that as well as it can now.

Isn't it interesting how 3 years is such a long time to support things now?

In my experience it has been that way for quite a while when you look at lower price point items in developing areas of technology, due in part to the speed at which minor changes are iterated and implemented in new models of devices.

But I acknowledge it may not of been this way except recently, and my memory could be painting over the 'good ol days' so I am not any more bitter and cynical about things changing than I already am.

I just bought a washing machine with a ten year warranty, to replace one made in the 80's for which there are still official spare parts (but that I felt was better off being replaced than repaired). You can find companies who are in it for the long haul, but it is true that most aren't.

Washing machines don't have twice as much wash performance after five years, though. Apples and soup cans.

With all the indie & low tech games around, I suspect console power doesn't double the enjoyment/thrill factor every 3-5 years either.

For a failed game console, 3 years seems to be about average. It's about how long sega had the dreamcast out, about how long Tiger's Game.com is, etc. At some point, companies have to cut their losses.

> Ouya had already added the play store I thought

This is incorrect. It only officially has its own store. You can "hack" the device to install Play though.

Well thanks for the info. I unfortunately clearly didn't pay attention to the fact it required side loading when I heard about it. So yeah, no more support (if it means no more store) will suck more than I thought for Ouya owners.

to be fair Ouya console was always uyseless

I actually think the Ouya was a very nice idea, and clearly so did a lot of people who backed it. The execution was awful on so many levels, but there will probably be room in the market for something like this once the console market is done shifting => non-existent. I would guess it will be part of something like the Apple TV box though.

What could have been done besides throwing more money at it?

How did Microsoft get the original xbox into a state of relevance?

Better engineering. One of the big issues is TERRIBLE (like.... >1/10th of a second) lag with the wireless controller.

My super hexagon score says otherwise.

> How did Microsoft get the original xbox into a state of relevance?

Halo. I mean, there was a pile of other Xbox exclusive games at the time that probably helped -- Fable, Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden, Steel Battalion -- but the original Xbox pretty much made its name entirely on Halo and Halo 2.

"How did Microsoft get the original xbox into a state of relevance?"

By dumping an insane amount of money into it, and waiting until the 360 to actually make any profit whatsoever. Not easy to replicate.

I have no idea why people are downvoting this, as it's pretty accurate. If anything it understates the difficulty. The original Xbox cost tons to develop, and Microsoft spent a lot more money getting games for the thing. In the process they created the canonical example of a console first-person shooter, the genre that now dominates game sales. (You could argue that Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the N64 got there first, but Halo is the one that really moved the market to where it is now.) Then on top of that, they created Xbox Live, which has had at least as much impact on how we play games as Halo did. And you're absolutely right that they lost money in the process. So yeah, dumping an insane amount of money into creating two products that revolutionized the game industry and not recouping that investment until the the second-generation product launched is how they did it.

"Created" is a strong word for Microsoft's contribution to Halo, given the original debut of the game at MacWorld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2RMHeMGDDU

Didn't it start as an RTS on the Mac, and only became an FPS when they moved it to Xbox?

If we're playing the pedant game, what I said was:

> In the process they created the canonical example of a console first-person shooter

Whatever one thinks about Microsoft's involvement in Halo, it wasn't going to be a console game at all without them. And I don't think it's the game that changes the whole industry if it's not the game that brought PC's biggest genre to consoles in a way that made them feel like they belonged there.

it's probably unlikely microsoft has made a profit at all with the xbox. keep in mind it lost a lot of money fixing the RROD problems (not enough thermal paste will cost you $$$!). then with R&D for 3 consoles, marketing, advertising, etc i'd be surprised if the entire thing has ever made money for them.

they are just dumping money into in the hopes that they will not lose out as a competitor in the family entertainment system although they totally screwed that one up during the whole E3 XBox One fiasco.

>What could have been done besides throwing more money at it?

A physical media format. So that buying games has real meaning to the user.

First-party games, instead of relying on third parties to supply the system sellers.

They dumped a ton of money into it. They literally bought game developers to make sure Xbox would get good games. And then Xbox Live basically redefined online gaming.

But the other thing is that Microsoft has a surprisingly strong hardware game for a software company. Most of the hardware they push out has solid fundamentals, even if the overarching idea or business model has flaws.

Examples:

- Keyboards (they're consistently good middle-tier, budget keyboards)

- Mouses (again, nothing to write home about, but they'll last you many years)

- Zune HD (amazing hardware, no traction)

- Xbox (other than the controversial huuuuge controllers and then RROD problem on the 360)

- Phones (again, solid hardware even if the software leaves something to be desired)

"Nice idea" very bad implementation. It released with an outdated Android OS running on pretty lame hardware, it had tons of compatibility issues and you couldn't play allot of the Android games on it at the time even if you managed to get the store working.

The store was also an issue they couldn't really figure out what they wanted, their own store, google play, amazon or any other 3rd party service.

It was way to expensive for what it did, under powered and obsolete out of the gate considering that you could buy cheaper and better Android4TV setups from DX or any other Chinese dealer at the time.

If you want a TV micro console done right look at the Shield TV from NVIDIA.

Pretty much the best hardware on the market at least as it goes for CPU/GPU combo some X86 CPU's might be slightly faster than the A15's.

Streaming capability from your PC (NVIDIA HW required) with pretty much no perceivable lag.

Streaming from the NVIDIA game cloud (GRID) with very little to no lag with a decent (10-20mbit stable) internet connection.

Tegra X1 specific game ports with quite a few games including HL2/Obox and Crysis 3 ports.

4K media support, including future 4K game streaming, the box can handle it it's about 2-3 times as powerful as the 360 in terms of pure GPU performance...

What you have described is called 'under capitalized.' What that means is that the company had insufficient capital to achieve all the milestones necessary for success. There is a variable of course, which is that some teams execute against a plan better than other teams, but overall the goal they set out to achieve was basically a $50 - $75M budget item. Which they started with maybe $2M (the rest of their Kickstarter money is really funding the COGS of their box and controller).

Its interesting to read the comments from the announcement here on HN and elsewhere which echoed a lot of the challenges. It is really too bad they weren't more successful than they ended up being.

Damn, i did not know Ouya was still relevant. I had assumed that the idea had fallen down to obsolescence land. Jokes on me though, they just pulled in 10M.

After raising 33M from VCs, a 10M exit leaves everybody with nothing… Likely, the investors got some cash for the IP, and the rest went into retention bonuses.

Man I'm just happy that i got my 100 bucks back from backing that god forsaken console.. also learned how to sell things on amazon, that was a cool experience.

So in a way i guess i got my money back from the "investment".

Well, everyone gets nothing except the people with the retention bonuses - the employees.

So, money was funneled from rich VCs to workers? I'm... okay with this.

Article says VCs got their money back, which in all likelihood means employees got nothing.

In my experience with acquihires the employees usually end up with a pretty nice package of RSUs, while the VCs take a huge loss. They don't make money on the exit, but they do well.

Where are you seeing a 10M exit? I don't see the purchase price mentioned anywhere.

I'm not sure where they saw it, as I can't find the source either. The only $10M value I saw was an investment from Alibaba. I did find this though, but we don't know if $10M was the final value: http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/15/razer-grabs-the-struggling...

I don't know anything about 10M, just responding to the parent comment that said "Jokes on me though, they just pulled in 10M."

Ha! Why would anyone buy one, or a sequel to it, now that it is made by the company that required an internet connection to use their mouse?

Url changed from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/249573/Ouya_buyout_confir..., which points to this.

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