Yesterday I looked at the Ouya on Kickstarter, saw “$950,000 goal”, snorted derisively, and gave them a $99 pledge, since $950,000 is a hell of a lot of money and they were obviously going to need every nickel they could get.
A lot of people must have thought that way because they met their funding goal in eight hours and will likely have tripled it by the time you read this. Yes, they’re going to easily make nearly $3 million in two days.
Now the question becomes…where do we go from here?
The Ouya has a lot of very nice and supportive comments from people who think it’s a great idea, but almost no commitments, right now, from anybody to actually develop games for it. For example, here’s a quote from Mojang on the Kickstarter page:
If OUYA delivers on the promise of being the first true open gaming platform that gives indie developers access to the living room gaming market, yes that is a great idea. We will follow the development of OUYA and see how it resonates with gamers. I could see all current Mojang games go on the platform if there’s a demand for it.
That’s an exceptionally polite “We’re going to wait and see before unleashing Minecraft on this thing”, but that’s still the message. Not that this stopped Ouya from photoshopping the Minecraft logo into their press materials, which is… troubling.
It’s true that the Ouya is Android-based and thus will be able to play Android games, and will likely support streaming services such as OnLive. It’s also true that having roughly 20,000 people, so far, essentially pre-ordering the thing is a big deal and will probably draw developer interest. Some of the Kickstarter money is going towards first-party development as well. And if all else fails, hell, the thing ships with a dev kit baked in.
But we all know that it’s exclusives and franchises that sell consoles. And what Ouya can get is still up in the air. I’m hopeful, and I’m looking forward to getting my Ouya in the mail. But we’ll see what happens beyond that.
image courtesy Ouya