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Comment by JVIDEL | Hacker News Reader

I really don't want to see the Ouya fail, but then again I didn't want the Dreamcast to fail either, and it did. SEGA was sort on cash back then, and because some hackers found a way to play pirated games without a hardware mod (the PSX needed a modchip soldered in the mainboard) it was the last straw for that company, and when developers started to flee and hyped games like HalfLife:Blue Shift were cancelled the dream was over.

I know some indies say piracy is not a bid deal for them, but it might be for the Ouya: at $99 the company is either breaking even or losing money on every unit, and the only way to get that money back is through games and microtransactions, but if piracy is dead-easy then they may never recoup the money, and like it happened to SEGA they will eventually run out of funds.

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> the PSX needed a modchip soldered in the mainboard

Nope, the way people played copies on the first PS1 (before the modchips arrived) was to use a spring loaded weight ($5) on the door sensor, boot a legit disc and then swap to the copy after the boot sound. No modchip required. The Sega Saturn required a mod, but it required no chip, just a few wires and a switch.

If you didn't want to "spring for the spring", so to speak, you could do it manually with a little more difficulty.

On the Dreamcast it was all software, not even a jailbreak, just some code on the pirated game. It left no traces, you could boot a legit disc and connect to SegaNet, try doing that with LIVE and not get banned.

Right now pirating on a X360, either with LT, RGH or JTAG takes so much work the vast majority of users don't bother to even try, but if it was like the Dreamcast you would have a totally different situation.

IIRC, I had my import DC chipped, but shortly after, the Utopia disc came out but by that time, I had lost interest in gaming for several years.

I don't think piracy will be a problem at all. Price points are going to be more like iOS ($1-10) than console ($40+). Comparisons to Dreamcast, et al are irrelevant.

First owners of Ouya will be the people who paid 100$ for it, on kickstarter, up front.

Those people will have near-zero interest in pirating games for the sake of not paying. And that's who the first generation of Ouya users will be made of.

Really? just 25-40k users for an entire console generation?

From the looks of it, it will probably be closer to 100k, which still isn't much. But I would imagine that there are a number of developers in that group, which means by the time it is open to the general public, at least there will be some games ready.

At 100k no one will bother to make a game just for the Ouya, probably not even support the platform which means adding controller support to an existing game. Keep in mind some games sold 100k units and were deemed a failure, even good games.

This is a console.

> At 100k no one will bother to make a game just for the Ouya

Ouya is yet another Android variant. The amount of work porting isn't like porting from 2 completely different platforms like 360 to PS3 or iOS to Android. This is just from one Android device to another. Plus it's not like Android devs don't already have experience with dealing with Android fragmentation. There are also plenty of Android devs who don't get enough attention on the major app stores. For just a little more work in porting from one Android variant to another they can have a whole new venue.

I said a game just for the Ouya, you know an exclusive like say Uncharted for the PS3, not necessarily a big AAA game, but a game that's only available on the Ouya.

If there really is a smaller barrier to developing for Ouya than other consoles, there will be Ouya exclusives.

It doesn't need that.

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