Ouya: The Little Console That Could?
With a massive warchest, the developers of the Ouya find themselves in an odd spot between mobile gaming and console behemoths like the Xbox and PS3.
The Ouya made history long before the first devices went into production. The $8.5M raised on Kickstarter for the three-inch cube ranks as the second richest project in the site’s history. Based solely on that, the console generated a lot of hype. It retails for $99. The creators insist that every game available for it feature some sort of free-to-play option. It embraces the hacker ethos in its openness, from the choice of Android as its OS right down to being held together with standard screws.
And yet, initial reaction from Kickstarter backers getting their consoles early has been muted at best. The device’s interface has been roundly panned, and the build quality has been criticized, with many saying the device and its controller feels cheap. The early shortcomings of the catalog don’t help, even if the device isn’t due to be released until the end of June.
Based purely on hardware, the Ouya would make a pretty decent smartphone. A quad-core 1.7GHz processor puts it in a similar range as the HTC One or some Samsung Galaxy S4's. While it doesn’t have a screen of its own it is capable of outputting 1080p. And, to be fair, the 8GB of memory comes up a bit short.But where the Ouya benefits is in not needing a battery. Those four cores can run at full power nonstop if need be instead of throttling back so you still have enough juice to check your e-mail at 9pm. The device has an Ethernet port, making it better equipped to handle playing games via OnLive, which was one of the device’s major selling points. In that respect, provided enough users have decent Internet connections with low latency, the Ouya could be what keeps OnLive going.
Ultimately, with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo working hard to keep their consoles hack-proof, the openness of the Ouya could keep it going simply as a hobbyist’s toy. Import gaming web stores used to sell the GP2X, a South Korean handheld that ran Linux. Not a lot of people bought a GP2X, but those who did used the device to run emulators, usually the first thing hackers port over to consoles once they can run unsigned code. Emulator developers are already porting their existing programs from Android to the Ouya, and Ouya’s CEO has already said he’s OK with emulators on the device provided they adhere to the company’s free-to-play policy.
Given its horsepower, the device could also work very well as a media player. A hardware-accelerated port of XBMC can already be sideloaded onto the Ouya, as can Netflix and Plex. Paired with a Bluetooth remote, it could be a compelling and more powerful alternative to the identically priced AppleTV. It would probably appeal more to a tech-savvy Android user given the hoops required to load software from outside sources onto the Ouya, but it’s less hit-or-miss than jailbreaking the AppleTV.
With a month and a half to go before the official release, Ouya’s developers have gotten plenty of early feedback on what wrinkles need to be ironed out, and what the geek community will do with the device. If they can recapture some of the buzz that surrounded the project during its Kickstarter campaign, it could keep the device from hitting the Android scrap heap alongside the Nexus Q and a number of Google TV set top boxes.
