Booyah!

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Ouya, the new(-ish) $99 Android-based, cell-phone hardware boasting “micro-console” by Ouya Inc., but whether you have or not, I think it’s worth the time to talk a bit about it, partly because its short history is already hilarious, but also because the original hype doesn’t seem to want to die down, and I fear that some people might be tempted to get one, despite its glaring flaws and preferable alternatives.

The Ouya sells itself as an “open” console. Open partly because it doesn’t require any fee from the developers to make their games available on it and there is very little curation (consequently very little censorship) on their marketplace, but also because it was supposedly very mod-able; it would be held together with regular screws and opening the box wouldn’t void its warranty. It also prides itself in how easy it is to port phone-based Android games to the little cube, and therefore would have a ton of games very early in its lifespan.

This pitch allowed Ouya Inc. to raise more than 8 million dollars on Kickstarter, over 8 times their initial goal of $950,000. Now, I have to admit that I don’t know which came first, the music or the misery (this is a High Fidelity reference, not a Fallout Boy one, I insist on that), but either a cheap, indie-friendly console was something that people secretly wanted all their lives, or the huge success of the Kickstarter campaign gave Ouya unprecedented publicity, but in the end, more than 60,000 people showed enough interest to donate at least $99 and “bought” themselves an Ouya.

Even then, I was baffled. For one thing, at the time, Ouya Inc. only had ideas, pictures and renders. They told people that they could provide a new console, with its own controller and marketplace, for $99 a piece, in less than a year. This seemed very hard to do, bordering on impossible. A lot of their promotional material also seemed really fishy, for example a video showing a mock-up of their UI with games like Minecraft and Madden 12 when Minecraft (which was, in a way, their flagship title before release) wasn’t confirmed (and still isn’t) and Madden being presented as the console version which obviously wouldn’t run on cell-phone hardware.

And even without the deliberately obtuse marketing, the mere concept of the thing is kind of… useless. People who want to develop indie games can do it on PC. People who want to play indie games can do it on PC. People who so desperately need to play indie games on their TV can connect their PC to their TV. One of the greatest things I’ve ever done (I haven’t done many great things…) was connecting my craptastic, 300$ laptop to my TV. My laptop, which I bought for 300$ 2 years ago, can do everything the Ouya can, but better, while also giving me access to the entire Steam catalogue (most of which, admittedly, it can’t run, but neither can the Ouya) and allowing me to edit text, watch any video from any service, run emulators, write a shitty blog and countless other things.

But it didn’t stop there. After the calculatedly obtuse initial marketing push, Ouya Inc. decided to get as close to outright lying as they could, the worst offense probably being a survey that they held, asking their backers what kind of game they would like to see on Ouya, the list of which included Battletoads, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, FIFA and Call of Duty, none of which have a snowball’s chance in hell to get on the Ouya.

Actually, I kind of want to shift the focus of this post now. I don’t want to go through all of the failings of the Ouya and the Ouya people, mostly because it would take all day (“devkits” which were just regular consoles, completely awful controllers, horrible excuses for a delay that everyone saw coming [including pathetic, unprofessional graphs showing obviously made up data regarding the number of shipped units], backers receiving their unit after the public release [and retail units actually being backer units supposedly sent to backers but diverted to retailers], units overheating very easily, wireless chip being awful, bluetooth losing connection extremely often, games being more expensive on the Ouya store than anywhere else, openly advertising itself as an emulator machine [illegally using copyrighted games], technical support taking weeks to respond to serious complaints but mere hours for obvious jokes [to which they reply very unprofessionally], most games just being shit…), so instead I’ll close with my thoughts on the whole project.

Before I do, I just want to say that I still half-think that it might be a downright scam.

But what I think might have happened is that someone, most likely Julie Uhrman, downloaded one of the better Android games, probably a racing game, or something else that looks pretty and is fun enough to play, but is frustrating to control with a touch screen or a gyro (UGH!), and thought: “Man, I bet people would pay money to see this on a big screen and play it with a controller”, either not realizing or choosing to ignore that while that particular game might have been good for a phone game, it paled in comparison to even a mediocre console or PC game. Yes, Shadowgun is impressive for a phone game, but plug it into a TV and give it controller support, and all you have is a sub-par Gears of War clone.

I’m never going to believe that the Ouya people wanted to spark an Indie revolution, because when I look at the thing, I see XBox Live Indie Games with worse hardware and a fraction of a fraction of the userbase. It doesn’t do anything to be friendly to indie developers besides bragging that it is. Not only is it unnecessary, it’s downright hurtful to indie game developers, by tricking them into wasting money making a game for a console that’s dead on arrival, by making the public wary of a possible future micro-console, and by tarnishing the reputation of Kickstarter, an otherwise great tool for indie projects.

Screw you, Ouya. Scrouya.

Unrelated, but man, you guys should watch Look Around You…