Few projects have seized the Kickstarter zeitgeist as effectively as Ouya - but it's destined to disappoint
This time last week, nobody had heard of Ouya; we might have guessed that it was an approximation of the sound of a polite grandmother dropping a hammer on her toe, or the carnal grunt of an Old Etonian. Seven days later, it's soared past its funding target on Kickstarter and has become one of the hottest topics in the industry. Yet it's been fascinating to speak to a variety of different people about the proposed console and gauge the reasons for their support, because doing so has revealed vast fractures in terms of what people actually expect from this console.
For most - especially those at the lower end of the pledging scale, I expect - their support is a reflection of pent-up demand for a smart TV device. An all-digital console with the same development philosophy as mobile and tablet games is seen as filling the gap which has been created, conspicuously, by years of talking about a Google, Apple or even Valve led Smart TV revolution which has thus far failed to materialise. Ouya hitches a lift on a variety of related trends in a pretty overt way - the rise of indie (and of the superstar indie developer - witness the quotes from the likes of Mojang and Jenova Chen on the Kickstarter page), the rise of crowdfunding, the sense of inevitability about mobile and tablet gaming making an impact on the TV screen.
"Ouya hitches a lift on a variety of related trends - the rise of indie, the rise of crowdfunding, the sense of inevitability about mobile and tablets making an impact on the TV screen"
Then there's the controller - a conventional joypad. No touch screen, no movement controls. Among the traditional gamers who have voiced hatred of such things for years, not a dry eye in the house. Could it be? Could this be the device that's going to reclaim these brave new worlds of gaming - F2P, mobile, tablet, digital - from the hordes of arm-waving, song-singing, touchscreen-molesting not-proper-gamers who have infested them? Shut up and take my money!
If you're detecting a hint of cynicism here - well, I think that's natural. Here we have a device which clambers atop a rickety tower of trends and waves its arms for attention. Think about it - it's an open platform, for indie developers, crowdfunded, all-digital, "disruptive" (maybe), hacker-friendly, free-to-play... It's painfully hip, like a console built after a brainstorming session consisting exclusively of words cut out from the headlines of Boing Boing posts. This console wears heavy non-prescription glasses and patterned cardigans, has a dreadful beard, drinks chai lattes outside pop-up cafes in Shoreditch and listens to the latest unreleased music demos on an old tape walkman "ironically". It couldn't have been more guaranteed the Kickstarter success it has ultimately achieved.
I don't begrudge it that. It has played to a crowd beautifully - perhaps even unconsciously - and indeed, it's a thing of beauty in many ways. Like the trends which have birthed it, the Ouya is a lovely idea. Cheap, open, hackable, filled with content from talented indie developers. It's a beautiful idea and in fact, it has the potential to become a beautiful little community - a creative incubator filled with new ideas being tested and trialled, welcoming fledgling developers to dip in and show what they can do, while giving more established developers a platform on which to trial new ideas. (Of course, PC advocates might point out that Windows and indeed OSX have been doing exactly that for years, but while there's substance to that argument, the point remains that console gaming and hence console development is intrinsically more attractive for some players, so there is theoretically room for an "open console" of sorts.)
The real problem is one of expectation. Ouya's creators asked for $950,000 and at the time that I'm writing this, they're hovering around the $4 million mark. Exceeding their target by such a margin has created immense excitement around the platform, and that's led to a lot of the fractures in terms of expectation that I alluded to earlier. Some people (outspoken Android advocates, mostly, which can't be an easy position to take and thus deserves our sympathy) view this as a final piece of the puzzle for Android, completing a platform comprising mobile, tablet and now console offerings and thus ushering in an era of dominance for their chosen OS. Others, more sanely but equally questionably, view it as a full-scale introduction of F2P mechanisms to the console space which will prove disruptive to the console business at large.
"What we've seen so far is a sliver of a fraction of a niche, not a workable market and not an indication of guaranteed success"
Those two are marginal viewpoints, certainly - but they can be found easily enough within many discussions around Ouya this week. Much more common is the viewpoint that this has just become a major battleground between "open" and "closed". Consoles are, unquestionably, "closed"
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