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The [Ouya] "Frees the Games" by holding them hostage for 6 months
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rTzJIxBHKc
For the sake of politeness and fairness, the Ouya is a video game console meant to play Android apps (and new games based on its architecture) on your big screen. The Kickstarter that funded the project to develop it is among the swiftest goals met in Kickstarter history.
That's just about where all the non-critical statements about the Ouya end.
Since its conception the Ouya and the company behind it (now called the Ouya Team I guess) has been scrutinized for a lot of reasons. Aside from Apple providing a cheaper solution to playing apps on your big screen, making for a very hostile and harsh competition scene, support of the Ouya has floundered at best. While a couple major names stepped up to provide software for the Ouya, such as Square Enix and Double Fine, a lot of the games promised are ports, and plenty of them have no release date. New exclusive killer apps were lacking, and even when developers commented on working on software for the Ouya it was usually full of a lot of "thinking about it" language.
When it came time for the console to launch, things continued to look grim. Many backers of the Kickstarter did not receive their hardware in a timely manner, if at all, and sales did not light the world on fire. Making things even worse, advertising for the hardware included emulation of other video game consoles. That kind of emulation.
At the moment, the Ouya folks are running a project called "Free the Games," where they have a million dollars on reserve to help fund video game development. The catch is that Kickstarted projects have to agree to a six-month exclusivity for the Ouya platform, and raise at minimum $50k. Ouya will then match the funds up to a maximum of $250k. This project itself is under scrutiny, as individuals backing projects that agree to participate in "Free the Games" are pledging unusually high amounts (one project has just over a hundred backers, averaging $600 each) - supposedly, one of the identities of a backer is actually the name of someone from a missing persons case. (Edit - I forgot to note, many of the accounts backing these Free the Games projects are first-time pledgers, not helping the skepticism of where the money is coming from)
Team Ouya remains optimistic and has taken a page out of the playbook of spinning all criticism (or just not addressing it), and developers continue to get skeptical - if not out right hostile. Which brings me to why I made this thread.
Apparently Julie Uhrman, found of Ouya, put up a blog post yesterday that managed to piss of developers. It's regarding Ouya's "Free the Games" promotion. Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb wrote about it here, but the bottom line is that devs are swearing off the Ouya in response to the post, and one of them even pulled their title off the Ouya store.
I've gotta be honest, I may be missing something, but the language of the Ouya blog post seems to be rather tame "our thing is awesome!" stuff, which is typical and not necessarily wrong for them to write. I suppose they were supposed to be addressing concerns developers had though? Someone help me out here.
NPD sales data hasn't come out for August yet I don't think, but July wasn't looking so hot. I don't think hardware that does what the Ouya provides is a bad idea, but it seems like these folks have just missed every opportunity to make this a good thing.
Henroid on
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That's pretty hilarious and bad. Screaming about how AAA games suck is the domain of the video game enthusiast. But the Ouya doesn't exist as a product for the enthusiast, it exists for the general consumer. And so do AAA games.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I got to thinking that the apps I would like to play on the big screen instead of my phone were basically already available. Video gaming has a large market with a lot of product, so naturally we have a lot of similarity. Remember the '90s when the terms "Doom-clone" and "Mario-clone" got thrown around a lot in all the gaming mags? I guess I never expected Ouya-exclusive games to actually happen and I barely play games on my phone as it is. I don't need the ability to play the games I barely play on a larger screen.
Then again, if the Ouya game selection was full of new SNES/Genesis-like games, I'd be all over this. But is there a market for that?
The Ouya was a terrible idea from the beginning -- a neat sound bite that unravels the more you think about it. It's not that the Android OS is necessarily a bad choice for a gaming system; rather that this company went in reverse, trying to make a game system out of Android and its phone library instead of making a game system and determining that Android was the best fit for what they wanted to do.
I really dont agree with this. Ouya's practically the most niche gaming console I can think of. Even that nVidia / controller hybrid thing is more mainstream than this...
Steam: adamjnet
What... the fuck.
If I'm understanding this right, the annoyance isn't in response to "Ouya is awesome!" message, it's that instead of actually addressing the problems that's come up she's blaming everyone else for misunderstanding what they're doing. (And let's not draw any recent comparisons, I'd rather not have a THIRD thread closed because of it.)
At any rate, Ouya is totally boned at this point. Games aren't selling, developers are pulling out and very few gamers (be they casual or hardcore or whatever label) really care about it, other than the ones that want to use it as a naughty emulation machine.
And thanks for making this thread, Henroid. I thought about trying to update the original Ouya thread but no one posted there for eons.
When does the NPD data come out, cloudeagle? It should be sometime next week right?
Wish we had a place to discuss it.
Steam: adamjnet
I'm not sure it's about scamming... it's about needing to drum up hype and excitement. "See, people want to take advantage of our awesome business partnership!" Like Ouya is essentially acting as publisher without being an actual publisher by funding things entirely. Buying the half-year exclusivity.
Which is a fucking ridiculous thing to ask for by the way.
Steam: adamjnet
I think they don't want to cross the line of slander / libelous material. So far the only allegations are coming from individual observers, not any official body, so using "allegedly" doesn't have as much heft.
Honestly I dunno if it's Ouya or just really clever internet trolls (who have money to burn?). But usually when you're looking at Kickstarter pledges you'd have a lot of $5, $10, $20, etc type pledges. Not like several hundred dollars each. Something is up.
Actually, I forgot to check this, but you can pledge any amount and then when the Kickstarter project time runs out, it attempts pulling the money from the associated account right? Is it possible people are just jacking around to sabotage things?
Long story short Kickstarter found nothing wrong with the big donors to Gridiron Thunder, but the folks behind Elementary, My Dear Holmes were found to be in violation.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/09/kickstarter-scandal-ouya/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/11/ouya-whats-going-on-here-then/
For example, why not just do an absolute crap ton of giveaways on Facebook/Twitter? Let's say two games manage the 50k goal and Ouya were on the hook for $100k. For that same $100k they could have given away a thousand consoles (probably more if you just look at in terms of their cost). Sometimes just good word of mouth is worth more than two unproven games...throwing out a few thousand systems might be a better move to establish the console.
Hell - selling the system for $50 and taking a loss for awhile would even be a better use of the money I would think.
Now that it is out I kind of wish it had been a scam.
$50 would be an impulse buy for me. $100? Eh... I'll wait for Vita TV.
Obviously in the case of Elementary, something fishy was going on, and Kickstarter handled it. In the case of Gridiron Thunder, they've admitted that some friends, family and industry insiders they know kicked in big amounts. Who cares? How many stories have we heard about companies getting started because grandma gave someone a couple stacks? So in this case, grandma and friends are filtering the money through Kickstarter so it gets matched. Big deal. I'm just not feeling the rage. This feels like a case where the indie community at large wants to make up a set of unspoken rules as they go to define their own level of "purity". It's why as much as I love indie games, I basically can't stand most of the indie game community. So far all I've seen is more reinforcement of that opinion, and very little nefarious activity (outside of Elementary) to rage about.
Frankly it feels like something to fill the void between PAX and the GTA5 launch for journo's and game hipsters.
6 months Ouya exclusivity requirement is something to bitch about
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
But then, OUYA getting banked for a poorly considered plan is worth a laugh, too.
That's probably the best article to read on the "Free the games!" thing. Also I should change the thread title because the "Free the games" fund is the thing this is all really about.
Yeah, they want to transfer some of the buzz from successful Kickstarters over to them.
Also they probably don't have the money, since it's selling horribly.
They've got the money to advertise in other ways though, ways that cost more than an individual drop of $50k to $250k on a dev team / person. I think Ouya doesn't understand the actual scope of Kickstarter and what it means to have success, like they've been wearing rose tinted glasses from all those major success stories - including their own.
Or maybe they think $50k is some sort of quality mark on video game development.
Like it or not, exclusive games sell a console. How many times have people said, "Why should anybody buy an Ouya, when you can play all the same games on your PC/your phone/your 360/etc?"
If you don't want to give Ouya that exclusivity, you're free not to take their money.
Well again, what benefit are the developers getting aside from money to produce the product? That can be great and all but it's not like the Ouya is huge on giving exposure.
And the barrier of entry to get Ouya dollars - 50k - is high. We're all kinda used to those million dollar Kickstarters and those are the minority.
I'm not saying it's a good deal. Indeed, for most devs, it probably isn't. I just don't understand how Ouya paying for exclusive content is, in and of itself, a sign of evil and something to rage over. It makes perfect sense for Ouya to do this, and every console maker does it.
And as for the high barrier, it seems like that's by design. I think what they're looking for is a few high-profile exclusives, rather than a bunch of low-profile ones, and frankly, $5000 Kickstarters don't get press on IGN or Kotaku.
Basically, stop looking at this as some sort of charitable action on Ouya's part, and look at it as a marketing vehicle and push for high-profile exclusive content. Then it'll make perfect sense.