NanoTech and OUYA Partner to Bring Games to the Nuvola NP-1 Streaming Media Player

[arcticdog]

You brought up almost all of my concerns in there. Google Play will always be the primary if it's present and then maybe some others. Ouya Everywhere is going to take a backseat to the other stores until there is the content to make something like this feasible and who knows if there ever will be when we have to start campaigns to ask people to port a game Ouya.

This little box is a beast. If Ouya 2 comes out with lower specs than some of the other boxes then what is stopping people from buying something else? In that case, the unit is only a positive for developers and not consumers.

I think what's misunderstood is that OUYA is a platform. Always has been. Yes.. the Kickstarter pushed it as a "new kind of console", but all consoles are inherently platforms. Emulation (a popular use of OUYA) has proven that consoles are platforms that don't have to exist as individual devices to be functional. Except, instead of some forced underground approach to emulation, OUYA is directly supporting it on compatible hardware they didn't design. It's akin to a fantasy situation where Microsoft announces an official X-Box One emulation mode on certain compatible Windows 8 devices. It doesn't diminish the quality of the platform or the official device. It just widens the market to overlap to some PC users. X-Box devs would always need to design for the unit to make sure the main use case is the best experience.

But back to the OUYA.. it has always run off of commodity, off the shelf parts, and that was always their strategy. Before the official devices were released, devs were basically instructed to make games for the Nexus 7, which would be more or less the same experience with a little modification. There's nothing in it, other than the software and specifications to build software on, that's special about it that separates it from other devices out there.

Going forward, OUYA is going to be more of a specification than a proprietary device. Since that's basically what it's always been. And that's not a bad thing.

But that platform specification will be realized into a dev unit that's accessible to everyone to keep price under control. So there will always be an OUYA branded device. Other than controlling price, it's critical for one to exist as a reference unit to control fragmentation. But in terms of the general end-user market, it's not critical or even that important that every single OUYA customer owns an official OUYA device. And in fact, if the user already has an OUYA Everywhere compatible device, it's consumer friendly to not require that user to shell out another $100 to play OUYA games by forcing them to buy a device. I know some feel they're no longer part of some special club by the device hardware itself becoming less important than the platform, but this approach is a lot more accessible or "open" (to again use that over-used term). It plays into the strategy.

What OUYA is doing is trying to develop a affordable TV-Gaming standard. Like a Blu-ray or DVD kind of thing for games with an evolving specification. Steam seems like they're aiming to do the same thing, but for the high end expensive market, and they're not taking the issue of fragmentation nearly as seriously as OUYA is by having some sort of referential standard. So in essence, Valve seems less interested in creating any sort of standard console experience more than creating a slightly dumbed-down PC-gaming rig that focuses on getting people into Steam rather than Window's app store (which, as I recall, was Newel's main motivation for the Linux/Steambox initiative).

And that's alright too, other than not solving the specification interpretation problems that plague most main stream consumers and is still a barrier of entry into PC gaming for a fair amount of consumers.


But what it most importantly boils down to is ... Having OUYA on compatible devices gets OUYA wider adoption nearly for free (in fact, better than free. Odds are OUYA is making something off the licensing).

Adoption is by far the biggest problem with OUYA at the moment. All of the other issues people bring up are merely symptoms of this problem. But if OUYA gets wide adoption, it will move toward solving the sales problems, which will solve the developer attraction problem, which will software quality problems, which will solve the perception problems. As a side effect, the OUYA Everywhere device manufacturers will surely promote the OUYA capability, which gains a positive visibility (something that's also been a struggle).

It also puts some of the burden of hardware manufacturing on other companies. It also opens up the possibility of partnerships with hardware OEMS that may do a better job than OUYA at managing that process. Hardware is really difficult to make money on when you're a small company with many avenues of product development. As OUYA and many of it's customers discovered, physical goods are always subject to quality control problems. And they're amplified if you're smaller, inexperienced and "less influential" (for lack of a better term). This opens the door to better official OUYA devices in the future, even if OUYA is not involved beyond defining the specs and slapping their label on it.