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[Christian Knudsen]

She's basically said as much:

We're looking for additional funds of money but more importantly we wanted to take it to Kickstarter regardless, because Kickstarter will give us the support we need from the gamers and developers to get additional content on the devices and bring additional partners to us.

But I'm having a hard time taking anything these people say serious anymore. With the whole "Minecraft is coming to Ouya" thing, when Notch's actual statement is pretty much "Meh, we'll see"; their poll on which games people want to see on the Ouya that includes games that cannot possibly and will never reach the console; the mind-bogglingly stupid idea of putting a root button front and center on the device; and the general lack of video or pictures of the actual device despite their claims of having a working prototype -- and instead releasing the fucking bootup sound as a reaction to the millions of dollars they've received through Kickstarter. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn this was an April's Fool.

[inkBot]

My guess is that they have potential investors, and Kickstarter was used to gauge interest.
However, I'm only speculating.

[crowe]

If someone made a cheap console-ish box that was a PC or even a linux box, I could understand that -- by producing in large numbers, price would go down, and you could make it optimized for output to TVs and such. Wine's gotten pretty good these days, and you'd leverage the existing library. Maybe make a custom UI and slap it on there.

Why you would do so with Android makes no sense to me. It's essentially the same as doing it with linux, except less useful. Existing library for android means fuckall because it all uses the touchscreen.

[eyeliner]

Nah, everything in Android is going to be rehashed to gamepad because of Bouya!

Or most probably not.

[SolarLune]

But I'm having a hard time taking anything these people say serious anymore. With the whole "Minecraft is coming to Ouya" thing, when Notch's actual statement is pretty much "Meh, we'll see"; their poll on which games people want to see on the Ouya that includes games that cannot possibly and will never reach the console; the mind-bogglingly stupid idea of putting a root button front and center on the device; and the general lack of video or pictures of the actual device despite their claims of having a working prototype -- and instead releasing the fucking bootup sound as a reaction to the millions of dollars they've received through Kickstarter. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn this was an April's Fool.

The poll was written in by the users - the OUYA devs didn't suggest what games would be on the system. The lack of device and controller videos might seem ridiculous, but the Kick Starter's not even over yet. Some people start Kick Starter with a lot less product to show, and get funded just as well - at least the devs have a prototype, which you can see them using in the video, albeit shortly.

@crowe - I think I understand why they went with Android. Linux wouldn't do well for porting apps to. While most cross-platform engines run on Linux, and so porting games would be easier, you wouldn't have the ability to use the OUYA as any kind of media device since the programs on it are all made for keyboard and mouse in mind. At least with Android, you should be able to just pop Android's Netflix client on it and go - full-screen and everything. Otherwise, you would have to get Netflix to make a Linux client, which they won't do.

I think the reason why this is poised to do much better than previous 'failed' consoles is because of Kick Starter. It allowed them to get into the public eye, so to speak. Other consoles relied pretty much purely on word of mouth, whereas the Kick Starter is achieving goals so that even people that don't tend to look at open-source consoles are looking. They're getting a large amount of fans and buyers, and devs can see the market is there, so they're getting in on the ground floor.

Imagine how good the GP2Xes would have been if they had a Kick Starter, or even the Pandora (if it wasn't so costly).

[eld]

I think the reason why this is poised to do much better than previous 'failed' consoles is because of Kick Starter. It allowed them to get into the public eye, so to speak. Other consoles relied pretty much purely on word of mouth, whereas the Kick Starter is achieving goals so that even people that don't tend to look at open-source consoles are looking. They're getting a large amount of fans and buyers, and devs can see the market is there, so they're getting in on the ground floor.

Pretty much, no other company could gather the money required to actually start manufacturing the consoles, kickstarter enables this to happen via "pre-orders", thus giving the team the money needed to get the units manufactured.

This would previously require an investor.

[Radix]

It still does.

[J-Snake]

I don't understand any point he is trying to make. Might be an indication that there is none. May be he is excited about chopping a game into countless parts and sell each of those.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i7KbP85E5w

[SolarLune]

@J-Snake - I think it's going to be a prequel that will be released before the 2015 'real' game. Hopefully more info will come out about other first-party titles.

@eld - Really, there's no way to know without seeing some details. Pandora costs $600, but it's not nearly as powerful as the OUYA is framed to be. The Raspberry Pi is a lot weaker, but $35 is clearly a very low amount of money to produce a computer for, and yet, it's happened and continues to happen. So, I don't know if $99 is enough to produce an OUYA for. We'll just have to see.

[e_va]

will koolaid man be da mascot for ouya console?

[Danmark]

Why you would do so with Android makes no sense to me. It's essentially the same as doing it with linux, except less useful. Existing library for android means fuckall because it all uses the touchscreen.

The Ouya controller will have a touch-pad that'll permit some games relying on touchscreen to be ported.

Apart from the controls, few Android games are high enough quality for a console. Also, every developer I know IRL doesn't like working with Android. So I'm guessing the decision was more to encourage cross-platform development between phones/tablets and Ouya.

Try to listen more than running your mouth. You might learn something.

Stay classy, lads. Stay classy.

Funny how you didn't bring it up back when I said that, nor when any of the valiant Ouya defenders got snarky.

Be careful. You're becoming a fanboy for a console that doesn't even exist.

[eld]

It still does.

From the addition in the article you linked to:

"Let me be clear, OUYA is not seeking additional funding outside of Kickstarter. Our priority now is to continue to focus on building a great game console while engaging in our ongoing Kickstarter campaign."

I still believe they'll need some investment if they want to push the ouya to the store shelves and into peoples homes beyond the hardcore fanbase, they just don't need it to get the console out to kickstarters.

I don't understand any point he is trying to make. Might be an indication that there is none. May be he is excited about chopping a game into countless parts and sell each of those.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i7KbP85E5w

I don't have much faith in that, I believe it's just going to be a tiny PR-game for the bigger title, a coupe to get more people to kickstart their game and most people seem to think it is their main game that will go on there.

@eld - Really, there's no way to know without seeing some details. Pandora costs $600, but it's not nearly as powerful as the OUYA is framed to be. The Raspberry Pi is a lot weaker, but $35 is clearly a very low amount of money to produce a computer for, and yet, it's happened and continues to happen. So, I don't know if $99 is enough to produce an OUYA for. We'll just have to see.

I believe people have tried to calculate the costs and it wasn't too unreasonable, the margins are tight though.

The pandora is pretty overcomplicated as a piece of hardware and still utilizes expensive hardware from the 08's, the Ouya is going for low-power stuff.

But yeah, I guess we will eventually see.

[Garthy]

Funny how you didn't bring it up back when I said that

Are you seriously complaining that I didn't personally respond to the post where you deliberately insulted rek soon enough? Get over yourself, dude.

[Garthy]

Re the whole Android versus Linux thing (and to crowe), a few random thoughts:

I think the Android decision came about because there are a lot of finished products already, mostly in the dirt-cheap area of the market, that could potentially be ported across to the Ouya initially. Android has a healthy paid app ecosystem, plus a boatload of (game) developers who know it, something that is presently missing for more vanilla Linux distros. Also, short of a well established and maintained Linux-for-embedded devices distro, the amount of work to get a custom distro going, running, and supported is considerable. Nokia got a taste for that with Maemo. If they go with Android, which is basically Linux plus app stuff plus some user-account-as-app-jails stupidity, the total work is lowered, and the developer mindshare is greater.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a heavy Linux user and developer myself, to the point that sometimes I have trouble using Windows boxes productively, but I can understand their decision. I think there will be a day for a fairly open commercially-successful Linux console in the lounge, but I don't know if it is today. Something like the Ouya could be part of the catalyst toward that happening though- Android is Linux with some extra cruft on it after all. With other things such as Humble bundles that run on Linux, the possibility of Steam for Linux, and engines such as Unity3D making slow and careful steps in that direction, it could be possible.

All IMHO.

[s_l_m]

I think that their are definitely pros and cons to choosing android over traditional linux. While the ratio of crap to actually good software may be a lot higher on android, it also has the basic convenience that is an important difference between consoles and pc's. It has the APK format to distribute its software, and has updates and payments simplified pretty well. Even what is (IMO) the best linux app store, the Ubuntu store, still can be a bitch sometimes when it comes to new versions of software. I have even had problems with software that doesn't work at all once or twice, but this is probably a product of the extreme hardware fragmentation that exists in the PC market but would not affect the Ouya.

This is all in my opinion of course. My linux knowledge is self-admittedly pretty lacking and I am sure it goes a LOT deeper than this. Any opinions?