The OUYA console... is it doomed? Inquiring minds want to know...

OniV2 said:

Well, if you're honestly going to bring up 'games aren't about the graphics' when we're talking about a home console (throwing in a comment about text-based games) meant to compete with the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U, then yes - you're going to met with snide comments. The GPU's capabilities translate more to being actually able to play the games, and that has little to do with the visual representation.

The Ouya won't be a worthwhile investment at its price. Honestly, it won't. The above two options, especially the latter Wii U gamepad rip off, seem to be a much better choice.

Valve's 'Steam Box' and other equivalents will likely catch the audience the Ouya is trying to get.

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Honestly, I'm rather amused that anybody's TRYING to compare the Tegra 3 to the CPU/GPU in a 360, PS3, or Wii U. From what I understood, the point was more to play Android games without paying $200+ for a console, as well as an open development platform, media streaming, etc.

I already bought one and I was happy to do so. The hardware you are getting for the price you are getting is a good deal imo. The fact that we can root/open it with a screw driver and still have a warranty are also a major bonus.

Yes it's not an xbox or ps3, but it isn't meant to be. I think it's going to do well. Go look at the kickstarter page if you have forgotten.

The way i see Ouya has been designed, it should be enough modular to be hacked.
So i HOPE there will me room to improve and especially install a tegra 4 .

I dont think OUYA is dead ...Otherwise i dont think it would have reached (and over-reached) the KickStarter goal !

Ouya's initiative is excellent (that's why i purchased one) but its future... with Shield + Android Game center... don't know...
They will be the first ones and should be reactive enough to embed the Game center ^^

Its not dead but I wish they would upgrade it to the tegra 4 on release. A non battery powered device is the ultimate use for a quad core a15. (I had a nexus 10 and damn that thing screamed with just the dual) They could let those things stay out of low power mode more often and the gpu in the 4 is literally 10 times faster. The a15 was designed more for this purpose than for phones. Its a scaling up of arm to higher power envelope so that they can branch out into servers and gaming consoles.

Seems like everyone is missing one key thing here. Ouya is up-gradable so as the smartphone industry pushes forward and better hardware is created you will be able to put a new board in your Ouya. No console has that at all and most of the current ones are on their last dance as they are replaced. Also with the quality of some games on Android thus far I don't see how this wont work. The one thing I see being the big plus is you can do what ever you want with it. The others don't want you doing that.

Though I am a big Android fan I have no need for this. I own a PS3. Why would I game on a sub standard console? Just because it's hackable and Android? Not good enough. The games aren't good enough to warrant me playing them on a 50 inch LCD.

anyone who purchased one already and people who buy them now and shortly after release, should realize we're buying on potential. It's another platform. I've played some fun games on my phone. Seeing what developers can do for games they think people will only play for five or ten minutes at times could lead to some fun titles designed for significantly longer play times.

Being hung up on the hardware such as which Tegra or how many GPU cores it has kind of misses the point. Not to say they don't have relevance. My understanding of Ouya was to create cheaper entry point for both the consumer and game developers. Considering this forum, most of use know how to get a controller connected to an Android device and get the image onto the TV. But I would say more people do not. Plus, developers aren't designing their games for TV sized displays or to have gamepad inputs.

At this point in time, I think Ouya will not be doomed, especially if you can play games from the Google Play such as GTA or have some sort of touch input for something like Dead Space. It's not going to have numbers like the Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo. It can definitely have a few million users. And given deal to see at retailers, probably see an install base of a few million

Here is some thoughts from Micheal Patcher from Web Bush on Ouya. He's an investment analysis for gaming. The Ouya discussion starts at 6:18

If I may put my opinion in here.

I will buy one yea.. it's not the best tech but android is open & this platform is just as open which is fantastic.

I bought a 99 dollar andoid chineese tv box because I couldnt wait for ouya anymore, dual core rk3066 with a quad core mali-400. It plays all my emulators n64oid sega plus plays unreal engine 3 with little to no lag 36.7 fps https://play.google.com/store/apps/...t it. Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2

no it's not

The hardware is on par or even slightly better than what you can get in a top of the line smart phone. The Android OS is going to be modified to essentially limit the multi-tasking requirements and expand the reach that each application will have to access the hardware.

Development of the games will be simple and the ability to use Unity Engine for the designing makes the console really the best option for any indie dev.

I'm not worried about GameStick, in fact I think the two will end up working well with each other. With a few dev mods the games will be portable between different Android devices.

The device will not only be upgraded over time by the manufacturers, but indie dev's and hackers themselves will find ways to upgrade the device. Since Ouya will be open to these mods it's likely they will seek later integration of these improvements on the device, then release them in future upgrades.

Also, looking at the device I can imagine interchangable boards are a near certainty. Upgrades will not come as complete packages that must continually be re-purchased, but you may get a new mainboard that simply fits right back into the "rubik's cube". Then as new hardware upgrades become available, games can futher be developed to make use of the upgraded hardware. Dev's can build a game with lower LOD for the older version of Ouya, and release different patches of the game with different LOD's based on your hardware's specs. That's just theoretical of course, but possible.

That's all because it will be Open Source rather than the suppressive Sony/MS/Nintendo hoops that developers need to jump through.

Lastly, the LOD may not be what PS3 or XBOX 360 games support right now, but they CAN be better than your average game for your phone/tablet. A good illustration of that can be seen in this youtube video:

dibblebill said:

Honestly, I'm rather amused that anybody's TRYING to compare the Tegra 3 to the CPU/GPU in a 360, PS3, or Wii U. From what I understood, the point was more to play Android games without paying $200+ for a console, as well as an open development platform, media streaming, etc.

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Well, it is a home console. Just because it's an extremely underpowered US$99 machine doesn't mean it's not pretty much in direct competition with the heavy hitters on the market. Hell, it's going to have to face the:

- Playstation 3
- Playstation 4
- Xbox 360
- Wii (which is now cheaper than the Ouya, and with a larger game library)
- Wii U
- Valve 'Steam Box' and equivalents from other manufacturers (like the 'Piston')
- Nvidia Project Shield and other new Android gaming devices

Just for the sake of argument, one can even push the damn Raspberry Pi as competition. It's cheaper than the Ouya and it can have Android installed.

I think it's honestly stupid to deny the competition the Ouya has just because it has a relatively low price point. Least we know that if it bombs, we'll all be there to see Ouya supporters accepting that the Ouya was only to blame. Right?

Prack said:

I already bought one and I was happy to do so. The hardware you are getting for the price you are getting is a good deal imo. The fact that we can root/open it with a screw driver and still have a warranty are also a major bonus.

Yes it's not an xbox or ps3, but it isn't meant to be. I think it's going to do well. Go look at the kickstarter page if you have forgotten.

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Hey how did you buy? pls

There is one big weakness in the Ouya, There are quite alot of NOT TEGRA 3 optimized games out there..

I am also interesting on how the developer would generate money from this, as for other console, you own the title, but here the games were cloud (or am I cloudy now?). Same goes here, i am eager to know more so I ordered one already. Hopefully it doesn't collecting dust as my Android stick though.

It is not only for gamin.

As far as I have seen people comparing it with other consoles only from the gamers view.

Well, you can watch live stream on TV with it.
You can watch HD video on TV with it.
Surf the web on TV with it.

Which mean it turns a standart TV into a smart TV and even more

From my point of view, I will buy one, Plug my USB HDD which has my movie archive in it and leave it to my parents house. So they can watch movies or play causal games.

It seems to be the most geeky & cheap solution.

I am sure they will have a good share in consoles market but they need to advertise right for that.

OniV2 said:

Well, if you're honestly going to bring up 'games aren't about the graphics' when we're talking about a home console (throwing in a comment about text-based games) meant to compete with the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U, then yes - you're going to met with snide comments. The GPU's capabilities translate more to being actually able to play the games, and that has little to do with the visual representation.

The Ouya won't be a worthwhile investment at its price. Honestly, it won't. The above two options, especially the latter Wii U gamepad rip off, seem to be a much better choice.

Valve's 'Steam Box' and other equivalents will likely catch the audience the Ouya is trying to get.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Do you even play modern games? Have you ever opened Live Arcade? Only the biggest oh blockbusters ship with the greatest of graphics. Look how well recent games like Minecraft, FTL, etc did. They don't look like Assassins Creed 3 and don't make as much (actually minecraft might, I'm not fact checking that though) but I'm pretty sure they show just how significant these graphically lesser games are in the industry to those ignorant of gaming.

I am of the mind that this will fail as a mainstream device because of the maker's stated objectives of having one console a year and not having a clear strategy to deliver exclusive content. Getting ports is all fine and dandy, but who cares? Android is also notorious for piracy which is why iOS still has better apps even though the number of android users out there has far eclipsed Apple. I don't see how using an ICS kernel will prevent this. Many software companies like Square and the people remaking Baldur's gate release much less content on Android than any other platform because of this and they release the content much later than on other platforms.

Content drives sales for media-consumption devices like this. I will probably get one to use as a media streamer once XDA gets out some custom roms for it. Tegra 3 is aging but it's still far faster than the single core 600/700mhz broadcom chipsets inside devices like the roku and raspberry pi. A tegra-3-based mini htpc is what a lot of enthusiasts is going to use this thing for I think.

nessonic said:

Do you even play modern games? Have you ever opened Live Arcade? Only the biggest oh blockbusters ship with the greatest of graphics. Look how well recent games like Minecraft, FTL, etc did. They don't look like Assassins Creed 3 and don't make as much (actually minecraft might, I'm not fact checking that though) but I'm pretty sure they show just how significant these graphically lesser games are in the industry to those ignorant of gaming.

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What part of me posting 'and that has nothing to do with the visual representation' did you not understand?

While I love Android, for many people a smartphone is a portable information device. Other than calls I use it for browsing the web, messaging, email, weather, maps, music, camera, basically all the functions that don't require a powerful processor, and the games I play are simply the 5 minute time killers.

I personally don't see the point in such a powerful processor in a phone as the size of the device is simply too restricted to play games for extended periods or watch movies etc. Nor do I see the point of the trend of huge phones, they're simply unmanageable in my opinion.

So a console with the same processor as my Nexus 7, which I do sometimes play games on sounds great. Honestly the Tegra 3 in my tablet is wasted, as again most of what I do on it is information based. the Nexus 7 is again too small for me to do anything useful.

I skipped the PS3/Xbox generation due to cost and time, my last console was a gamecube, which I still use now and then. I'm definitely considering ordering one with a second controller for my girlfriend, and I suspect it will be graphically similar to the gamecube, possibly a little better due to modern gaming engines with better optimizations and chips with more advanced methods of shader processing etc.

Few things I noticed:
New console every year, but they don't want the next one to make the previous one obsolete, so if you get one now it should still work fine for at least a few years to come

People talking about their experience with the Tegra3. Sure, it's the same chip, but this one is optimized to be a power hog. It doesn't have to worry about battery life, so they have said time and time again that this will be the most powerful a Tegra3 can be because they worked with NVIDIA knowing that this product would always be plugged in. Still only a Tegra3, but not "the same Tegra3" that is in any other device right now (Ok, it is the same one, I know, but it is optimized for sheer power, no battery life concerns).

Still don't think it will be HUGE... but it will probably be picked up by at least a few parents and grandparents who just know that it is a video game box that they can get for cheap for their kids, as well as nerdy kids without much money who want to play some cheap big screen games (I mean a lot of the games you can play on a tablet will look great on a big screen and be a similar [NOT THE SAME] experience as an 360 or PS3 game for a lot less), as well as just the nerdy folks who want things that are new and different. It will be selling at BB and Target, so there will be a few folks who pick it up just because they have no idea what it is (especially the aforementioned parents and grandparents) and some of them might even like it enough to recommend it to their friends who might buy one just because they are cheap. They might not like it though... Then again, they could sell this first batch and end up on clearance by the end of the year. I don't know, I just know I am getting one through Kickstarter and that's that.

ynrozturk said:

Though I am a big Android fan I have no need for this. I own a PS3. Why would I game on a sub standard console? Just because it's hackable and Android? Not good enough. The games aren't good enough to warrant me playing them on a 50 inch LCD.

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Playing all previous gen games on your 50in screen doesn't excite you? Playing every NES, GENESIS, SNES, GAMEBOY, GBA, PSX, PSP, ATARI, etc game... Being able to natively use XBMC doesn't excite you? The possibilities are endless!