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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Developing for consoles has generally been a ridiculously expensive endeavor. This breaks that mold.

No, it doesn't. This shows that you can do some consumer facing and software development around an outdated commodity platform and release it. That is nontrivial and the Ouya team certainly deserves credit for it, but it is not on the same level as what Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo do to produce their consoles. And it shows in the final product.

Also what makes you think that someone won't buy a console just to play one (really good) game?

I feel like you're wishcasting, which seems to be commonplace in Ouya discussions. What "really good" game is going to be a killer app for Ouya? The platform has very small reach and I can't see anyone with a truly promising title making it an Ouya exclusive.

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It doesn't have to be exclusive, since this console is cheaper than others. If you want a tiny, stylish, $100 SNES emulator, this could be it.

That's a good point, but if that's the way their product ends up being used, the company is looking at a rough road. Obviously I have no privileged information on their operations, but the BOM for their console is not leaving much in the way of a profit margin on hardware. So I have to think they're banking on people buying games and making their bones off of that. If people use the machines just as emulator boxes, I would bet that the Ouya folks have cause for alarm.

They're giving away the razor here, and their blades aren't better than anyone else's.

Well N64 and SNES emulators have already been announced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ouya_software

That's great, but emulators don't pay the bills. (Which, to be honest, I'm glad for; making their bones off pirating other people's work would be pretty gross.)

"Pirating" SNES games? Where can you legitimately buy a SNES game that would give money to the creator?

Wii Virtual Console.

XBox Live Arcade. Nintendo's Virtual Console service. Re-releases on the GBA/DS/3DS. Not all games can be purchased this way and there is certainly a moral argument towards emulation to playing games that don't have such re-releases or were never released in an accessible market at all, but it is an observation that the ones people want to play can generally be acquired in this manner--your Chrono Triggers, your Final Fantasies, your Marios.

There's little defense for emulating the majority of games people actually emulate older consoles to play, aside from "I want it for free and no one will stop me."

People actually emulate a ton of games not available on virtual console. In fact, emulation is a pretty popular way for people to play fan translations of games that were never released in english (tales of phantasia, radical dreamers, etc.).

It's true that there are plenty of folks who pirate chrono trigger via emulation but there are also plenty who want to play the more obscure titles out there.

I am aware, but I noted a defensibility for those cases, didn't I? I am, however, skeptical of any claim (not that you are making one, but such a claim in general) that they are a majority, or even significant minority, of the set of people who download and use emulators.

You can give money to the former publisher's holding company's acquired trademark owner on virtual console.

It is worth noting that re-releases are coordinated by the copyright owner. Trademarks are not relevant here. It's also worth noting that most of the games you see that people actually want to play still have their copyrights held by relevant parties. Square-Enix re-releases the Final Fantasy series--and they still own it. Street Fighter or Mega Man re-releases? Capcom still owns it. Super Mario Brothers? Nintendo owns it. Phantasy Star? Sega still owns it.

Most of the games where copyright has bounced around are quite abandoned and not resold at all; in the "abandonware" situation I'd be much more receptive to the idea of emulation to play them. But those are generally not the games that most people pick up emulators to play.

Trademark should have been Copyright, you're correct. However, the creator of Megaman is no longer at Capcom, the creator of Final Fantasy is no longer at Square, Sega is no longer Sega, but owned by Sammy.

That dodge? Really? "Oh, the single lone sprightly soul no longer draws a paycheck from them! Woe, woe, they deserve nothing! Take it for free!"

The companies that bankrolled the entire thing are still there (or--shocker--have been subsumed into another company, which spent money to acquire its assets). Your excuses are poor ones designed to paper over that you want something for free and can take it so you will. At least the guy who says "fuck 'em, I can take it and nobody will stop me" is honest.

Nintendo has always released low end commodity hardware.

Not in the sense that I mean, sorry. The Ouya is barely more than a Tegra 3 reference board with some furniture around it. The internals of the Wii are custom to the Wii, and that's orders of magnitude more daunting of a project.

Which does not mean that the Ouya cannot be good. (Basic microeconomics has a lot more to say on that topic.) But breathless cheering about this project "shattering the mold" doesn't really reflect reality.

That's true, yeah, but comparisonwise power doesnt mean much. Get one quirky multiplayer 'angry birds' hit and this thing will smoke ps4 in sales.

I find that extremely unlikely, because the Ouya is a parasite platform--it exists to suck up ports from other platforms (chiefly Android phones and tablets). This makes it very easy to port away from as well, and I find it much more likely that any game with significant potential is ported away from Ouya as soon as possible to reach a platform with more extant users--removing the drive to purchase an Ouya at all.

It is a problematic situation for Ouya, because they have no compelling reason to stay on the platform once you sniff the slightest success.

I agree, at best for game devs the Ouya will be a test market for games before they are ported to other consoles.

The only place it might have an advantage will be for games that allow third party modding. Games with a side market for community DLC could be an interesting idea.

It's funny that you mention that, as I'm exploring exactly that for Android right now. =)

Android games are (so far) touch-oriented, whereas the Ouya has a console controller with analog sticks and triggers, shoulder buttons, d-pad, etc. It may be easy enough to port Android games to the Ouya, but it's also easy to make a game that doesn't port back well.

I think he means games being ported to another controller based platform like the Xbox.

If you are an indie dev who releases a game for the Ouya and gets some respectable sales you are quickly going to do the math on how many more sales you would get from a Xbox/PS version. As a result consumers are more likely to think "Oh, an Ouya game. I'll just wait 3 months for it to show up on Xbox".

Sure, that's true. Now the bigger question: who'd bother writing those games primarily-for-Ouya in the first place? You've got Windows PCs right over there, Macs and Linux PCs accessible without too much more work, and if you play your cards right, you can even deploy to the 360 (yeah, XNA's EOL'd, but it's still viable for XBLIG, and that's a lot better of a controller-based platform than Ouya is).

In the rare, doubt-it'll-happen case of a hit game coming out first on Ouya, I would bet we'd see it on Steam, for cheaper, within six months--because porting will, by necessity, be That Easy.

Ouya could, depending on tech stack get a port in that situation (and I've considered it for my own project because I'll already have a gamepad API for the Windows/Mac release), but it will never be a leading platform that people actively target because the market share is infinitesmal. There are too many better options in front of it.

EDIT: Also, bear in mind that Ouya isn't doing anything groundbreaking with their gamepad stuff - the gamepad APIs already exist in Android 4.x. The only Ouya-specific stuff I have seen is in their purchasing layer.

PC's are not very living room friendly, cost more than $100, and don't come with console controllers. 360's are more expensive to develop for, are prohibitively expensive to push frequent updates to, and are heavily censored. They also cost more than $100.

About half-true; the 360 is not expensive to develop for if you're doing XBLIG, which is probably the top speed of most of the "Ouya developers" I've seen out there. It is if you're an XBLA dev, but most of them are not. ("Censorship" is bizarre; I would hope we're not pushing RapeLay here.)

But it is purely a numbers game: if you've got a chance at 0.05% of Steam consumers you've blown away the 25% or even 50% of Ouya owners who might be interested in your game and it's not even close. And that means that nobody's going to write exclusives for Ouya and so the value prop for buying one, outside of a small perfectly-targeted segment that doesn't have a console and wants to play games in the living room and doesn't care about established franchises and is really really cheap, dies on the vine.

All it will take is one "Angry Birds" hit for 20 million people to snap one up in a month (or create huge demand and no supply), and suddenly it's the hot console, which is a pretty "compelling" reason.

It's not really about power though, it's more about exclusivity and uniqueness. For example, the Wii wasn't as powerful as the 360 or the PS3, but it had a unique control scheme, and exclusive games that took advantage of it at launch. No other platform offered even a remotely similar gameplay experience at the time. It has been said that some games were only possible on the PS3 (GoW 3). The Xbox 360 is best experienced with Xbox Live, which leaves other console gaming networks in the dust. The upcoming Steam Box will have Steam.

For the Ouya to "smoke" other consoles in sales, it will have to offer something unique, and that looks like a really tall order at this point.

Idk that I would agree with "low end commodity hardware", when almost every one of the consoles Nintendo has released has been completely revolutionary. This has been the case many times.

But this is besides the point, ask anyone what sells nintendo consoles, its not the consoles. Its the amazing 1st party games.

Not quite "always".

The N64 particularly was pushing the envelope for consumer hardware at release and both the NES and SNES were quite advanced for their time (though their USA releases lagged quite a bit behind the Japanese/Famicom releases, which means at the time of US release they weren't quite as impressive).

They certainly stopped focusing on advanced hardware (in the raw CPU-power sense) post-N64 though.

NES and SNES were underpowered for the time compared to home computers, which most people didn't care about, which is why they succeeded.

N64 was a bit more modern, you're correct, because they went with the SGI/MIPS, but I was distracted from Mario 64 by GLQuake 16 player LAN deathmatches, so..

I disagree that they were under-powered compared to home computers, at least for their intended purposes of playing arcade-style videogames. The computers of the time by and large didn't have the sort of dedicated tilemap-scrolling hardware that allowed those systems to run arcade-style games so smoothly.

It wasn't until Commander Keen (circa 1990) that PC systems were capable of doing these sorts of games justice (and then just barely) and the videocard you used in such a system would cost significantly more than an entire NES/SNES console.

Of course there are other systems like the Amiga (my first two systems were a C64 and then later an Amiga 500) and the Atari ST that did have more game-friendly hardware but they were also nowhere close in terms of price range to the consoles and while more game-friendly than PCs still never quite achieved the pure tilemap-scrolling bliss of the dedicated consoles.

Of course, after the explosion of 3D graphics with the Rendition and the original Voodoo, PCs took off in terms of raw gaming power and have left console systems in the dust since, but it wasn't always that way.

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