I don't get the negativity on HN for this project.
This team is trying to disrupt a truly oligopolist market - I really hope they do it.
Give them a break on marketing announcement dissection at least until you see what they build.
This team is trying to disrupt a truly oligopolist market - I really hope they do it.
Give them a break on marketing announcement dissection at least until you see what they build.
Gamers seem to have backed this based on an idea that it's a $100 full fledged console. It is not. It is, at best, a tablet that hooks up to your tv and has a controller. At least as far as the hardware is concerned.
On top of that, their release timelines aren't even remotely realistic. March? They don't even have their online store prototyped yet. They have some UI mockups and that's it. Launching in March? Yeah right.
And then there's the issue with allowing the console to be fully open, using a hardware platform that is already having so many issues with piracy that developers are slowly being forced to release their games for free and supported with ads to make any money.
I have no doubt that if this system ever materializes, it will make an impact, but it's a long stretch to think you'll be taking delivery of this system in March and playing Final Fantasy 3 on it.
"That [controller] design is not final," I was told. "We are in a prototype phase and exploring several options."
"We know the hardware specifications, and are working with electrical and mechanical engineers to test the performance of the hardware. We have begun work on the user interface and software. We’ll pull all these pieces together and test how they fit, while we finalize the product."
It reminds me of that Kickstarter flashlight that's been in development for over a year[2]: they're not quite saying how little is done, and they'll be in over their head in no time. To me, every bit of marketing copy from Ouya seems willfully misleading.
[1] http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-reality...
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/527051507/hexbright-an-o...
With a big vision like this, it'd be concerning if everyone was just cheerleading them on and being yes-men.
The realistic prospect for a product success is rarely heavily scrutinized. And success rates are always statistically quite low.
Mr Charles raises some valid doubts about launch time. They're most certainly not a stretch - considering the tons of horror stories about launching hardware products we've seen on HN.
Let alone attempting to create a whole new market segment in a highly competitive environment - where even with success - making money might be difficult.
That's the problem. I'm not sure how a reasonable person can read the outright venom displayed in comment after comment all over the internet and then with a straight face say that it is somehow well intentioned. I don't know why so many people hate anything different that threatens the status quo. I guess it's just human nature. The phenomenon seems to manifest itself particularly in the consumer tech space though. The incumbents get praise heaped on them for doing little more than tweaking and renaming their e-mail service but let a group of people throw some pocket change at a video game console that isn't backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation and all hell breaks loose. I hope the Ouya succeeds if for no other reason than for the haters to have to wipe the egg from their faces. But who am I kidding? They'll just find some other underdog to kick.
For various reasons:
1) The idea hasnt come to fruition yet, so it can be shaped and molded with feedback. (unlike color or cuil which both hard-launched with a full product and strategy and no sense of reality)
2) People are talking about your company. peroid. Building something that noone cares about or only gets the odd "thats cool" is way worse than having pages of critiscm.
3) Knowledgable people are spending their time analyzing every part of your business. For free.
Once you get past the sensitivity to rejection/bad feedback which all entrepreneurs do in the first year, its not such a bad thing. Although obviously not a goal one should strive for.
Implicit in your statement is the assumption that "a tablet" is less capable then a dedicated console. Is that necessarily the case? Perhaps the aging console hardware still has an edge in blockbuster first-person shooters, but considering consoles generally render at 600p, I doubt the technical disparity is that considerable.
But even beyond that, the raw speed of the consoles is unlikely to be matched by one of these tiny integrated ARM devices for quite a while. The raw CPU speed may get there, though it absolutely isn't right now. But the graphics chips? Not a chance. On top of the fact that the integrated chips are flat out slower, they are also lacking a huge amount of features compared to dedicated chips. You need look no further than Open GL ES for iPad to see the major differences.
I don't have raw numbers but if someone were to provide them, you'd see a magnitude of power disparity.
And these were projects for things that are "dumb" objects. I don't expect the Ouya to be on time at all.
I just find it hard to understand that people want to buy products on just a guarantee from a team, without reading any type of real world reviews from other people
Most of the kick starters that I find are successful, are those which _already_ have a fully functioning prototype that people are able to use, work, play with - and the kickstarter is something that lets them do this at scale.
The kick starters that are for the R&D/Development almost never hit their targets - even for projects much less aggressive than this one.
Plus - the budget is tiny for all these sub-projects, particularly because they are going to have to pay for all these consoles out of it. It's a train wreck in the offing.
But (and I say this thinking about things other than Ouya) a game platform does not need all the things you list at the outset. That's like saying you need to create an EA in order to make games. If you can put together pieces to make hardware that will run a game successfully, you can have a start.
There is a vast gulf between homebrew and EA which is not very well exploited commercially.
Heck, just having a controller working in 8 months would have been a huge victory, controller + API + console in 8 months is what I would have targeted. Six months after that a developer platform. Six months after that a Downloadable (free) store. Six months after that a Store-for-Pay. And Six-months after that some AAA games available, like Minecraft or FF7. These are realistic goals, and would have avoid the certain disappointment when in March, Ouya doesn't have Quality Console+Controller+Store+Free-Demos+AAA Games.
Which, alas, I guarantee you it really, really won't.
For example, this particular news update about FF is misleading, as the version they're proclaiming to be exclusive is already available on iOS in the US(and can be played on a TV too), so they're adding caveats such as "on a console on the TV in the US".
A significant portion of the Kickstarter audience may not be knowing the above and might think that this is a big exclusive coming to the platform. The utter hype surrounding this is immense, and not much is ready. While this does not mean that they're going to fail, it sure is hard to execute and they need to show more before hyping the platform to raise even more money from the ordinary users.
Edit: There is more detail on this below, with some contrasting views for FF3, which I've never played.