Google to make Android console

[James Andrew Coote]

Whgy should we be scared of something that could potentially better then the Ouya. In my mind it's a good thing as it would be a nice step in the right direction. Your Ouya won't break if something better comes out. You can still use it and later on maybe get the better device. Don't be threatened. Lol.

Value proposition, for consumers and developers alike. Why Ouya? When it launched it was a new thing. Now you got Amazon, Google, Sony Playstation, we haven't even heard from Apple yet. Why Ouya over these? That's the question Ouya needs to answer and I would be curious to know what that answer is.

Discoverability. Google Play and Apple App Stores are terrible when it comes to connecting users with apps. For small app developers, it's pretty much impossible to gain a foothold in the app charts. OUYA have done a whole series of things to address that, as well as make life easier for developers and consumers. Google have not shown that same commitment to constantly improving their app store and working with developers and consumers for everyone's benefit.

So likely, Android TV if it takes off, will see another race to the bottom and situation in which the store is anti-competitive and ultimately bad for consumers.

[Nitrogen_Widget]

Discoverability. Google Play and Apple App Stores are terrible when it comes to connecting users with apps. For small app developers, it's pretty much impossible to gain a foothold in the app charts. OUYA have done a whole series of things to address that, as well as make life easier for developers and consumers. Google have not shown that same commitment to constantly improving their app store and working with developers and consumers for everyone's benefit.

So likely, Android TV if it takes off, will see another race to the bottom and situation in which the store is anti-competitive and ultimately bad for consumers.

They would need to create a controller only section of play.
They would also need to create a universal controller API

Thing OUYA has already done.

Also, I just don't see any manufacturer who decides to build an Android TV device going more powerful Than a T4 or it's snapdragon equivalent simply because there is no point unless they decide they want to build and market the device as a gaming console first & media player second.

Even with the new android L 64 bit OS google is making along with a 3d gamin API specifically for the K1 I don't see any gaming devices using it other than the rumored Shield 2.

[Killswitch]

People want the latest thing. Never underestimate the power of marketing.

If I said the K1 could change tires, burp babies and water plants, it would sell like hotcakes. No one is pushing the chip right now but saying you're coming out with a T4 now puts you behind all the others. The Razer one is supposedly a K1.

But these are not gaming devices.

[Kodakami]

Again being a 'Jack of all Trades' device means while you can do a little bit of everything, you aren't really good at one specific thing.

If less than half your target audience are gamers does it make sense to include a controller that costs you X amount of dollars in your standard bundle?
No, of course you won't because your competitors (Apple TV, Fire TV, et. al.) don't include gaming controllers and if you include one it increases your material costs and hands over the price advantage to your opponents.

If the controller has to be purchased seperately, likely to the tune of $40-60 dollars each I can tell you right now GoogleTV's total cost will be much higher than an Ouya which has a controller included. Likewise if developers can't guarantee their customers have controllers how can they make games focused around them? Discover-ability will be a nightmare and with a heavily fractured audience I don't see an advantage from a developer POV.

Yes, you want your game on as many platforms as possible, but I wouldn't value GoogleTV or FireTV higher than an Ouya and its solely controller focused marketplace, especially with the Ouya Everywhere program on the horizon.

[trizznilla]

In all honesty, to beat Ouya all they need to do is build something with working Wi-Fi and working controllers. A few of my friends went straight to Target and bought Ouyas after trying out mine. As far as I can tell, the ones on shelves are the old ones with bad Wi-Fi (rendering it useless for two of my friends) and they all have issues with the controller. If you read that right, none of the people I talked into an Ouya are happy with their purchase because the two most important things are broken. As far as I can tell Ouya put a non functioning product on the shelf for the masses and are sorting it out after the fact. Those people I tried to turn on to the Ouya would be super fans if they didn't get slapped in the face right after they opened the box.

[Foppy]

With no wifi and no controllers Ouya still is better than anything else. That's how good Ouya is.

[azsouthendzone]

In all honesty, to beat Ouya all they need to do is build something with working Wi-Fi and working controllers. A few of my friends went straight to Target and bought Ouyas after trying out mine. As far as I can tell, the ones on shelves are the old ones with bad Wi-Fi (rendering it useless for two of my friends) and they all have issues with the controller. If you read that right, none of the people I talked into an Ouya are happy with their purchase because the two most important things are broken. As far as I can tell Ouya put a non functioning product on the shelf for the masses and are sorting it out after the fact. Those people I tried to turn on to the Ouya would be super fans if they didn't get slapped in the face right after they opened the box.

Bingo.

Plus I think we all in our heads think that a lot of people know about Ouya. I have never met anyone that knew what it was before I told them. No one.

I seriously doubt Amazon, Google and anyone else in this conversation lose any sleep thinking about what Ouya will do next.

With no wifi and no controllers Ouya still is better than anything else. That's how good Ouya is.

Ouya doesn't even really like Ouya.

[Kuesco]

Well, at first the OUYA was sold as a new game console, but is not THAT good, then as a way to play emulators and revive nostalgia, but nothing spectacular, more late as the indie explosión but no thousand of indie games has come, and finally as a good media center, but the por hardware cant manage full hd movies or 5.1 sound so bum!! But sure we are not talking about a "Jack of all trades" uh?

With no wifi and no controllers Ouya still is better than anything else. That's how good Ouya is.

And thats the way the OUYA ends. You can close your eyes when the train is coming and you are stuck in the railway, maybe you don´t see but for sure you will feel pain.

fans sometimes loose focus, and sees a distorted reallity, try to ask to all that loyal Commodore Amiga fans but not to Commodore because there is no more Commodore.

Without wifi and controllers the ouya is just a brick, no matter how much love you put in it. AND with wifi and controllers the OUYA still needs to walk a loong road, so time will tell.

[arcticdog]

Ouya 2? It better have a really, really, good trick up its sleeve to even see the light of day.

I think Ouya 2 will never happen and the Android TV along with all of these other micro consoles has pushed Ouya into the Ouya Everywhere phase. They cant compete. They know this.

OUYA's can't compete on the level of being an app store/distribution center alone along the policies of Google Play. That is most certainly true.

But OUYA (and also Amazon and Apple) curate the entries that get submitted to the store for functionality and conformance to a set of rules they've established. Some of those rules enforce content, while others, in the case of OUYA, enforce common issues around scaling the application to the television screen. OUYA takes this a step further of performing a final tier of playtesting and offering advice to the developer on how to proceed with pricing, as well as suggested changes to make the user experience better.

In order to evaluate those conformance and functionality rules, you NEED a reference device to measure against (aka OUYA 2, 3, X, Ragnarock.. or whatever clever name the sequel device/platform specs may be).

It's quite possible that OUYA 2 will be Mojo with an OUYA label on it, but it will still exist for their operations side of OUYA Everywhere to move forward. Future official OUYA hardware may also just end up being dev kits, but it's needed for developers to develop against, and for Discover evaluators to judge apps against. And more importantly, it needs to be consistent so that the two of them are on the same page when they're submitting/reporting issues back and forth to one another.

Google's store is a free for all, and everything around curation is crowd sourced (i.e. a number of users have to fall victim to a bad experience before it becomes visible, let alone anyone does anything about it). Its strength is it's the largest Android software store out there, where 60-70% of it may actually work on your device, and 5-10% of those apps are anything worth trying. The last part being something that users routinely complain about on OUYA. At best, it's the same experience as OUYA with more crap to wade through unless you're looking primarily for corporate game experiences. And that's okay. But that doesn't mean Google Play offers everything to everyone.

They would need to create a controller only section of play.
They would also need to create a universal controller API

Thing OUYA has already done.

Also, I just don't see any manufacturer who decides to build an Android TV device going more powerful Than a T4 or it's snapdragon equivalent simply because there is no point unless they decide they want to build and market the device as a gaming console first & media player second.

Even with the new android L 64 bit OS google is making along with a 3d gamin API specifically for the K1 I don't see any gaming devices using it other than the rumored Shield 2.

It's actually way more than just a controller API. OUYA and Amazon (for now) have a predictable hardware spec. Something as trivial as the amount of RAM available can impact how a developer approaches development of their game. If that differs from device to device, the developer has to anticipate it, pander to the lowest common spec they know of, or be okay with the fact a game might hard crash on some devices that don't have enough memory when the game attempts to allocate across the expected boundary.

OUYA and Amazon (for now) also have a predictable CPU/GPU spec. API compatibility NEVER means performance and behavior will be the same from hardware profile to hardware profile in an OEM-run environment. It all depends on how the OEM driver developers interpreted the API's behavior and to what extreme conditions it should behave as it does. This is largely why Apple has been a successful platform for game developers and satisfaction is reportedly better there. They don't have an infinite number of devices to test on, and the devices they do have are individually tested against for compatibility and conformance to the form factor. It puts customer experience ahead of sheer volume. This is the pattern OUYA (and to some degree, Amazon) are following.

In all honesty, to beat Ouya all they need to do is build something with working Wi-Fi and working controllers. A few of my friends went straight to Target and bought Ouyas after trying out mine. As far as I can tell, the ones on shelves are the old ones with bad Wi-Fi (rendering it useless for two of my friends) and they all have issues with the controller. If you read that right, none of the people I talked into an Ouya are happy with their purchase because the two most important things are broken. As far as I can tell Ouya put a non functioning product on the shelf for the masses and are sorting it out after the fact. Those people I tried to turn on to the Ouya would be super fans if they didn't get slapped in the face right after they opened the box.

It sounds like you and your friends picked the short straw in this case. But I'm not sure it's fair to label this as a "slap in the face" unless they reported it back to OUYA and OUYA didn't make it right. There's always a potential for a bad lot of any product to arrive at a store. How seriously it's taken to remove it from the shelf by the store usually comes from corporate. So while it's possible OUYA didn't bother to try to identify these out in the wild, it's also possible they didn't know which ones had the bad components or the impact/risk was so minimal that Target didn't bother to remove them from the shelf.

The same kind of thing happened with me when I bought a Nintendo DS years ago. I went to a Best Buy and returned the item 3 times because each one had 50-odd dead pixels on the screen. Nintendo clearly didn't know which ones were bad, and it's hard to believe they'd willingly let it ship in a condition like that. Best Buy knew, but chose not to do anything about it, or couldn't do anything about it because they didn't know if it was a fluke and I got the bad ones, or the whole lot was bad. Since the 3rd time was the charm for me, it would have been hard to know short of opening every box.

I know the average consumer doesn't experience or even think about things like that. But companies, regardless of their size, are all run by humans and all subject to quality control issues. Some more than others.

[Foppy]

Well, I was of course kidding a bit with my response about no wifi and no controller. It's no fun when you buy something and it's broken. I would contact Ouya or return it to the store. But I made a joke because I think people are too negative. I compensate by being too positive.

There are (or have been) issues but at the same time there's a library of some 800 games, both hobbyist and professional, and more are still being added each week. So there's activity, people are playing those games. Let's hope for the best and enjoy what is there. (After having faulty controllers replaced...)