After a remarkably successful Kickstarter campaign
that raised over $8 million last June, the startup will release its
eponymous Ouya game console to retailers on June 4, it said on Thursday
evening. The $99 box aims to disrupt the television gaming market the
way that the iPhone upended the world of portable games, by allowing any
developer to craft inexpensive games. Based on an Android chipset, Ouya
aims to keep costs low and encourage innovation in a way that
traditional competitors can’t.
Wired got its first hands-on time with a finished Ouya at the San
Francisco offices of fuseproject, the design firm of Yves Behar, who
created the tiny metal cube that houses Ouya. It’s still a little rough
around the edges (there was a bit of controller lag and some crashes)
but CEO Julie Uhrman seemed totally at peace with that. Ouya is going
out to its “earliest backers” beginning today, and she says these early
owners will be able to “watch the UI evolve to where it will be by June
4.”
As of right now, it’s just fun to hold an Ouya. One doesn’t
expect a game console to come in such a tiny form factor. It’s
deliberately underpowered, of course, but as of now that just seems to
be leading developers to create pretty 2-D imagery or use simpler
polygonal models, instead of trying to force the hardware to render
things it wasn’t built for.
Ouya and its controller.
The interface is simple, just a menu of four words: Play, Discover,
Make and Manage. The latter lets you adjust the system settings; the
first is a list of the games you own. It’s in the middle two options
where things get interesting.
It’s common knowledge in the world of iOS apps that you get noticed
in one of two ways: Get featured in the store via Apple’s secretive
process of internal curation, or (by hook or by crook) get onto the
top-grossing or most-downloaded charts.
“We don’t think downloads or revenue are good indicators of what a
good game is,” Uhrman says. To that end, Ouya is crafting its own
automatic algorithm that will determine whether or not a game is any
good, based on other players’ behaviors. How many times have they played
it? For how long are they playing it? When a player turns on their
Ouya, is it the first game they immediately boot up? All of these
factors will influence how prominently games are positioned in the Ouya
marketplace when a player clicks on “Discover.”
There will also be an element of hand-picked curation on Ouya. That
process, Uhrman says, will be led by Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Journey
creator thatgamecompany and now Ouya’s head of developer relations. All
new games will go into an area called the “Sandbox,” and will be pulled
up into the “Recommended” feed after they hit the jackpot on the
automated fun algorithm, or are selected by Santiago’s team.
Kickstarter backers’ names etched into the Ouya console.
Ouya’s radical re-envisioning of television games doesn’t stop with
just recreating the iPhone on the TV. There’s no difference, Uhrman
says, between a developer kit and a retail console — all you need to
make games is the Ouya and a PC. You can connect it to your PC and
transfer your game builds directly to your Ouya, then upload them for
all to play and test if you want. These will be listed under “Builds” in
the “Make” menu.
Game designers are also free to try different methods of
monetization, some that are allowed on the App Store and others that are
not. For instance, a difficult action game called Stalagflight
is free to play and offers no in-game item purchases, but simply allows
you to donate money to the developers via an in-game menu that states
that your purchase will not alter the game in any way.
Will a digital “tip jar” actually work? Who knows? Then again, you
could say the same thing about Ouya. It’s true that the gaming landscape
is shifting tectonically, and it seems like the ground is falling out
from underneath the traditional, established models of the
super-expensive console and $60 games. But just because Ouya’s
philosophy seems sound doesn’t mean that this particular device will
succeed.
Either way, we can certainly see Nintendo and Sony reacting to the
new landscape with their presentations and booths at Game Developers
Conference this week. Nintendo, in lieu of showing off its own new
games, is demonstrating how small developers can create inexpensive
games on Wii U by using HTML5 and Javascript.
It was in jumping around the menu and playing the Ouya games, passing
around the controller with Uhrman and other Ouya employees, that I
realized how different this was from the other game console demos I’ve
attended over the years: Nobody in the room knew what was going to
happen. When I was playing a game, the crew was cheering me on because
they wanted to see what the next level looked like. Now that it’s in the
hands of developers, Ouya isn’t entirely Julie Uhrman’s baby anymore —
it’s filling up with content at a rate faster than she and her
co-workers can keep up with it.
And it hasn’t even launched yet.
