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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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