Rugged individualists you are, most of you ignored the issue of
market appeal. Doesn't matter how many developers get on board, because that alone can, at best, lead to a benevolent circlejerk ala the Game Park scene (or numerous console hacking scenes). Playing boatloads of ports & a couple original games is cool and all, but the Ouya guys seem to be pushing for mainstream success.
Just not seeing Joe Gamer impulse buying a new machine that, for
his purposes, does nothing his favorite console doesn't. Another danger is it becoming the wrong kind of mainstream success, with existing Android devs carrying over their cloning operations from the smartphone market (this is why the hardware & software's proximity to phones & tablets is a legitimate concern), thus providing a high-end experience for shitty derivative casual games. I mean, these guys are so prolific that they'd choke out the platform.
What would be fantastic is if the machine caught on with all the demographics: vocational devs, cashmoney devs, hardcore gamers, and casual gamers. We'd have a massive console civil war.
One reason I'm not enthused is because the dev experience on Android is shite, whether or not it succeeds. It's unlikely to succeed. Learn from the examples of Phantom, DISCover, Gizmondo, and Pandora. Listen to Podunkian. If it comes out, it probably won't catch on, and it'll almost surely be flaky & more expensive than $100. If it turns out averaging just a tiny bit more than $100 per console in total expenditures for Ouya, bang, you just blew a Benjamin on someone's dream.
I've seen the statements here about the graphics hardware not being on par with modern standards. The Wii has the weakest processing hardware of any home console this generation, far inferior to that of the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3. Yet, the Wii has become the highest selling home console of the seventh generation.
The Wii's success is thanks to
A) loyal fan[boy]s carried over from previous generations, while Ouya is a new name
B) casual appeal, while Ouya presently only appeals to gamers so hardcore they reject 'hardcore' as a phallic rape culture tool of disempowerment
Not sure why everyone keeps pointing to its soon to be lower end hardware. The thing isn't being designed for shiny HD AAA titles, which I take as somewhat of a plus. Hardware limitations (at least in graphics) will hopefully allow devs to focus on things like gameplay more and not burn themselves out spending however many millions on a game only to have the company fold.
A lack of processing power isn't a plus by any concievable stretch. For any given game project, more optimization work is required if lower-end hardware is the target, or the target is so weak the concept itself needs to be dumbed down (gameplay is just as constrained by hardware). Look at XBLA and XBLI games. Barely any, successful or otherwise, try to max out the graphics hardware. On Ouya, that same apathy would lead to much uglier games, with more narrow appeal.
That said, the hardware's not bad at all for a hypothetical $100.
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