What Ouya Isn't
games.hazzens.comThe key he is missing is Android. The huge big advantage of the OUYA is that it leverages the Android ecosystem. As a game developer myself, we were already developing OUYA ready games before the OUYA existed. Many (most?) games in the Play Store right now are already ready for the OUYA (gamepad support, freemium, 10 feet experience) or close to it. Which are a great good practice for developers to be following on Android anyway. And now the OUYA is an additional encouragement.
I agree with the author that the OUYA is not the future of gaming. Android is the future of gaming, the OUYA is just a tiny piece of the whole puzzle. There will be plenty of competition in the Android gaming-focused set top box in the next few years. The OUYA is just the first one. Maybe the OUYA itself will fail and lose ground to the competition. I don't know, nor do I care. It doesn't matter. What matters is that in the end of today it will have helped drive the Android ecosystem forward. The OUYA sends a clear message to the incumbent. Even if the OUYA dies because it couldn't outsell the new sony/samsung/whatever Android gaming boxes. It still succeeded on a game developer's point of view. Because the OUYA ever existed. More developers will be making their games compatible with consoles. More OEMs will be building Android gaming devices of different formats. Both game developers and gamers win.
He's right, the OUYA is just a so-so box without much special by itself. But it doesn't make sense to look to the OUYA by itself. Almost no one would've backed the OUYA if it was just a new platform never seen before. But it's not. The OUYA is just a detail that shows a clear trend that was not as obvious before (though many of us were saying this for years). Which is that Android is the gaming platform of the future.
Author here. I've updated my post to include some words on the current Android games market and how none of it maps to the Ouya. Simply, a game written for a 4.5" diagonal phone screen will not scale down to the 2-3" diagonal touchpad on the controller and then back up to the 52" diagonal of a TV. You have lost too much fidelity in the process; the game will feel wrong if it even works at all.
As for Android being the future of gaming - I don't believe it. Why might a motley collection of devices with disparate specs upend a highly focused and adaptable juggernaut, besides it making a great story? This won't kill the current gaming juggernauts anymore than streaming content killed television ones.
>> Why might a motley collection of devices with disparate specs upend a highly focused and adaptable juggernaut
Isn't that what gaming PCs are?
I think you misunderstand vibrunazo's point about some games being "Ouya ready". You can already plug an Android into a TV and connect it to a controller, so some games already offer proper, non-touch gamepad support, designed to work on a big screen.
Here's a video of Sonic 4 Episode 2 that demonstrates this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fUP6mh3aOg
Plus, touchscreen games don't all require you to tap specific points on the screen (as in your Reversi example). Look at Temple Run: you duck and jump by swiping down or up, from anywhere on the screen, rather than tapping on-screen Duck and Jump buttons.
I have a question, and I'm genuinely looking for an answer here.
Why would I want to play games designed for a phone or tablet on a big screen when I can play them on my phone or tablet already?
I personally find it much more comfortable and relaxing to be able to hold a controller in my lap while looking up at a TV. With games on my phone or tablet, I either have to strain my arms holding it up high enough to be in front of my face, or I have to strain my neck to look far enough down that I can hold the device in my lap to play; there just isn't a comfortable way to play a mobile game for more than 5 or 10 minutes.
> Android is the future of gaming
This is a pretty big statement. I don't see Android gaming taking any sizable chunk out of PlayStation/Xbox/Wii, or iOS gaming for that matter. I see Android gaming doing fine on Android and among smartphones in general.
What Ouya is, is a free emulator for older games. And an OnLive box. And an XBMC box. And by default of running Android, a Netflix box.
There are 3600 people willing to pay to reserve their usernames. Almost 60k people have bought the hope of having one. At worst, it will get a retail push and be a BlackBerry PlayBook level failure. Or it may not, and it could be a Raspberry Pi like success (in terms of buzz). Or anything in between.
What I don't get, is the immense hate it gets. I don't see anyone calling it "the future of gaming", except maybe the press people behind the product? And that's kind of their job. The derision it gets from people who seem to think they're on a Crusade to teach the unenlightened that they're being bamboozled is weird. It's a game console, primarily aimed at a tech-savvy audience that doesn't mind hacking their toys, and even soldering them. And yet I haven't heard that audience reach even the levels of annoyance of an iOS/Android argument. Much less one that needs to be told (repeatedly) that their toy WILL NOT change gaming! ... Who pigeonholed the OUYA as a flagship in the revolution anyway? Marketing? So air your screeds at marketing people. Not those who enjoy tinkering with computers.
>What Ouya is, is a free emulator for older games. And an OnLive box. And an XBMC box. And by default of running Android, a Netflix box.
So a regular XBMC box does that better, and does it today.
>What I don't get, is the immense hate it gets. I don't see anyone calling it "the future of gaming", except maybe the press people behind the product? And that's kind of their job. The derision it gets from people who seem to think they're on a Crusade to teach the unenlightened that they're being bamboozled is weird. It's a game console, primarily aimed at a tech-savvy audience that doesn't mind hacking their toys, and even soldering them. And yet I haven't heard that audience reach even the levels of annoyance of an iOS/Android argument. Much less one that needs to be told (repeatedly) that their toy WILL NOT change gaming! ... Who pigeonholed the OUYA as a flagship in the revolution anyway? Marketing? So air your screeds at marketing people. Not those who enjoy tinkering with computers.
Whoever it came from, there's some hype that needs addressing, otherwise people are going to be disappointed and angry when it arrives. Do all of those 60k people realise they're getting what's basically an xbox360 with fewer games but open? You wouldn't think it to hear the media reports.
There is absolutely no comparison between the android ecosystem and the XBMC ecosystem. Android has many orders of magnitudes more apps than XBMC does.
Few of them designed for anything console-shaped.
More to the point, your XBMC box can run ordinary windows programs, of which there are many orders of magnitude more than android apps. Plug in an Xbox360 controller and you're playing on something very like what many existing games were designed for.
Initially I was excited for Ouya. Not because I was ever going to own one (console/tv gaming sucks for my lifestyle) but because it would mean there would be better games on Android.
Except now I'm not so sure.
Making a game work on a touchscreen 30cm from your face is a completely different proposition from making a game on a controller 4m in front of your face. It's nice that the underlying OS is the same, but it's not that nice.
It's not a case of just adding controller support-- your entire game changes. Fruit Ninja works on touchscreens, it doesn't work on controller. Street Fighter works on controllers, it doesn't work on touch screens. And FPS works well on neither (go go mouse + keyboard).
It's not just the controller either: playing games on a couch in your living room has different motivations to playing a game on a smartphone. Shallow 'toilet games' make sense on smartphones, they do not make sense on consoles. Deep 1hr+ strategy games, or games with consistent network access etc, make sense on consoles, they don't make sense on phones.
So I think one of two things will happen: games will either heavily target one platform or the other, and have either no support or horrible crippled support for other control schemes and mechanics, or games will genericise to the point where your controls and 'motive' is less important.
I'm not a big fan of either result.
Note: Console vs. PC is a good case study. They've had years to get this right, and there are still lots of horrible console ports. I'm not talking about bugs or graphic quality here either, but stuff like the controls on PC being awful, the UI being targeted toward consoles (Play Skyrim of Oblivion to see what I mean), hilarious console-focused messages about not turning off my computer while the game is saving, etc. If Bethesda can't spend the money getting two UIs right I can't imagine an indie dev being able to.
"And FPS works well on neither (go go mouse + keyboard)."
Crazy sales and millions of console FPS players would disagree. I think playing an FPS on a controller is "normal" and just fine as of the current generation of consoles. Of course there will be edge cases, too (quake 3, CS, etc.).
Yeah, I considered leaving that example out ;-)
So FPS games have changed dramatically to work on consoles. They are often third person, and it gives you a better sense of space on a display so far away. They have become 'slower' and the fighting has become mostly horizontal and far less vertical, because controllers just aren't as good as a mouse in terms of aiming. The games tend to have lots of 'shooting' gallery style situations since it's harder to both move and shoot. The whole chest-high wall thing is another by-product, as is auto-aim.
I'm not saying you can't play FPS: you definitely can, but a mouse fits better. I find console FPS / TPS games are easier on PC because the mouse aiming is just so much easier.
I can't think of a way of phrasing this in a way that doesn't sound like "my dad could beat up your dad", so I'll simply say it and hope for the best: I'd wager than an average FPS player on a mouse + keyboard would be 'better' than a good FPS player using a controller, due simply to mouse superiority.
(I haven't played a console FPS in a couple of years though, perhaps things have changed)
It's clear you haven't played FPS on console in years. Neither had I. I've always been a person who believed a PC was a must for FPS. Then my friend decided he was going to get Battlefield 3 on 360 not PC, so I did the same(with great hesitation about how I would do). It turns out - it's not so bad. I crank the rotation sensitivity way up, turn off auto-aim (frankly, it makes things worse) and I do well enough. I will, however, agree that aiming with mouse/keyboard would still be better & faster (at least for me). Battlefield is also a real FPS it's not third person like Gears of War. Luckily console and pc players don't play on the same servers, so the issue of having a leg-up on PC is moot.
It's fairly clear when games are designed for console first or for PC first. For example, Battlefield 3 on the console didn't have some of the fundamentals of a AAA first person shooter title, such as making sure it runs at 60 frames a second. Details like those were reflected in their Metacritic score, where the PC version stood significantly above its console counterparts.
Ironically, Battlefield 3 has sold roughly 2M PC copies, 6M Xbox copies, and 5M PS3 copies. [1,2,3] It was numbers like these that caused most of the game franchises to switch to console if they weren't already focused on them. A lot started out being PC-focused such as Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell and The Elder Scrolls come to mind, but all of their latest franchise titles are heavily designed as console games first.
I would argue that first person shooters are a dying genre on PCs through just looking from the competitive scene with gaming. While there is still may be a lasting Counter Strike scene, the focus has gone to the latest Halo or Call of Duty being played on a console for competitive FPSs.
It just happens to be that some game genres really don't work well on the console no matter how hard you try. Halo Wars was well done as a console designed RTS, but just doesn't have the same depth as its PC counterparts such as Starcraft or Warcraft due to the restrictions on the interface and controls.
Even if you do manage to design for the platform, a lot of games just don't work.
[1] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/35315/battlefield-3/ [2] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40231/battlefield-3/ [3] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40230/battlefield-3/
Ah, but there you see, for fps with a controller to work you need a lot of assisted aiming and a slower pace.
Microsoft tried cross platform halo but it didn't work that well: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/rumor_microsoft_killed...
>> Street Fighter works on controllers, it doesn't work on touch screens.
I dunno about that. I've got SFIV Volt, SF II and King of Fighters on iOS, and they're not nearly as bad as I thought they would be. I normally use a fighting stick over a pad on consoles, but I definitely prefer the touchscreen over a game pad.
Sure you don't get the purist's 6 button controls, but then again, you don't on some of the other handheld versions either (SFA3 on Game Boy Color comes to mind).
The one thing the author fails to address is what is actually revolutionary about the OUYA: It is a TV-based console without a developer licensing fee.
This is revolutionary because on any other platform, the developer produces the software and the distributor takes a cut of the earnings, and the console manufacturer takes a cut of the earnings. (Remember all that "loss leader" talk when new consoles come out and are cheaper than what it costs to manufacture them? This is why.) By the time everyone gets their slice, you have a pit of dedicated game developers making $15k a year that have put up with distributors telling them what kind of game to make, who then ultimately get fired when they've done their job as commanded. Seems like a career you'd need to love to stick with it.
Even if the numbers don't work out in the end - if OUYA's cut is just as big as the big guys, if the CPU doesn't cut the mustard, if developers can't sell big enough numbers to stay afloat, etc. - it still seems like a worthy enough idea to back it if you're a gamer and want to see what developers could do, free of the shackles of conventional distribution. I can also completely understand people being relentless about personally promoting the console if having more gamers is actually what it needs to get the game developers to break even developing for it.
>The one thing the author fails to address is what is actually revolutionary about the OUYA: It is a TV-based console without a developer licensing fee.
This is wrong ! You will have to pay 30% of each sold copy of your game to the big G ?!?
Source: For applications that you choose to sell in Google Play, the transaction fee is equivalent to 30% of the application price. You receive 70% of the payment and the remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees. From: http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/a...
From what I understand from the Kickstarter, Google Play might be an option for distributing your games, but Ouya will have its own store as well. If it's not sold on Google Play, you don't need to pay Google for it.
> Ouya is a lot of promises and fluffy ideals in an industry that doesn't give two shits about them. An open machine plugged into my TV sounds cool, but what would I use it for that one of the myriad non-open options doesn't already do?
Not very friendly sounding, but this last paragraph is the very crux of the matter. If it's as open as we hope it will be, then there could be a huge number of things that it does that non-open options don't do.
A great deal of that "number of things" are something that most game developers don't want their consumers to be able to do on the same hardware as their games. And I can't really blame them for it.
(Seriously, the intensity with which they're pushing the "you can hack this!" angle is bothersome from the perspective of somebody who has considered, though now rejected, supporting this thing for a current title.)
On one side I want it to succeed (the liberal hobbyist in me), on the other side I see some problems (the conservative console game developer in me)
I don't see how AAA title would be delivered to this device. And without AAA titles, the device can't be primarily about games.
What used to fit in CD-ROM in PSX days, then on DVD in PS2/Xbox, now it needs bigger and more storage. With the recent download limits from internet companies that would become even harder. It's one thing to stream 2-3hr movie - it's completely another to have the assets on time, even to places where bandwidth is not that great.
TRC - Technical Requirements Certification process - This is the GATE to the quality. It's way more hard and complete process than Apple's or Android (if there is any).
Security - Hardest part to get. You can't succeed here, it's a goalie position. But if you can hold long enough, you'll be good. Yes, piracy is what makes video games unsellable in China (so far micro-payment seems to work there).
Original Titles - Without them, or much improved Ports of something else - there is no direct incentive to buy it.
Second nature - The device does not serve as something else to be used mainly instead of games. When I bought my PS2, there were not many PS2 games, but it was (and still is) pretty good and cheap DVD player.
> What used to fit in CD-ROM in PSX days, then on DVD in PS2/Xbox, now it needs bigger and more storage. With the recent download limits from internet companies that would become even harder.
Depends on your Internet connection. As a Steam user, I'm used to downloading games and love the benefits (no worries about losing the disc); though I think the largest game I've downloaded is Portal 2 at ~11GB, even 50 GB will download overnight on my home connection, with a good server. But in general, I don't think OUYA is expected to be about AAA titles...
> Second nature - The device does not serve as something else to be used mainly instead of games. When I bought my PS2, there were not many PS2 games, but it was (and still is) pretty good and cheap DVD player.
Sure it does - classic game emulator, media player / streaming target. Other consoles have to be hacked to run XBMC.
Why is a device without AAA games necessarily a device that isn't primarily about games?
I'm genuinely curious about this. From my perspective, the Ouya seems to perfectly match my gaming habits (I have not played a "AAA" title in many years), so I have to wonder what about the economics of the situation make the Ouya fundamentally untenable.
Because it would not catch mainstream people. No "cool" kid in the school would play unpopular games. And most popular games are AAA, yes there are quite a few indie gems - minecraft, angry birds, plants & zombies - but only few of them can keep them attached for many sequels.
Where Mario, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, and many others are games where kids expect them and know about them. These are AAA titles. This is what sells a console.
I don't really think it's going to compete with the big three in terms of total sales.
If it succeeds it's probably going to be as an addition to the current consoles. If it costs $99, bucks why not buy one?
AAA titles? This device is about "disruption". By default that means it won't get the very best games out there, but that's irrelevant. Did iOS have AAA title games in the first few years? Can you even say it does now? And does it matter that it doesn't? Because I don't see it.
I kinda agree with your point, however I don't think you picked a good example. The iPhone and iFriends were not sold as gaming devices (at least in the beginning, and even now it's not their main function).
The other "open source" consoles I know of were handheld (gp2x, pandora, etc...). It was a niche market, mostly for emulation with some homebrews. None of them really "disrupted" anything.
Of course, the ouya's main gambit is the android market, we'll see if it'll give them enough momentum to make it.
I think what he's missing is that a lot of people are expressing interest in building games and apps for it specifically and maybe exclusively.
This addresses the weak point of android and also newly released consoles. New consoles (the wii comes to mind) tend to have a lack of games, which tends to in turn make them less attractive. Android phones are pretty damn good these days but the apps are worse than iOS ones in general, which gives me pause when considering it.
Good devices without content suck, and vice versa (maybe a bit less so). So it's all about packaging good content with your good device. I think that's what they are aiming at.
You make it sound like developers need to develop specifically for OUYA, many Android games can be very easily ported to the OUYA platform. By using Android OUYA is also tapping the giant pool of existing Android and Java software engineering talent. They are attempting to bridge the gap between smart phone games and console games.
No, its probably not the future of set top entertainment but for $99 I would take an OUYA over an Apple TV, Roku, whatever else any day of the week. Just because it isn't revolutionary doesn't mean it won't be cool/useful/successful.
> You make it sound like developers need to develop specifically for OUYA, many Android games can be very easily ported to the OUYA platform.
This has been soundly disproven by anyone who's used XNA to try to port between the 360 and WP7. Most non-trivial games need to be significantly re-thought to be comfortable on both touch and controller-based systems. The interfaces are so hilariously divergent that, no, it's not a simple port at all.
At least, if you care about good games. (Many XBLIG developers don't either. That's a ghetto too, like I expect OUYA to be.)
It's not just porting, but re-designing for gamepads, TV size and viewing distance, longer gaming sessions, etc.. Mobile touchscreen games are not going to translate without changes to gameplay and control schemes.
The best candidates for OUYA are games that have on-screen buttons (yuck!) and wireless gamepad support (who does that on a phone/tablet anyway?!). They will probably be easy. But who wants to play Fruit Ninja with a joystick? Or sit in front of their TV hitting only one button to play Jetpack Joyride?
There is a case to be made that mindshare and user culture matters more to long-term success than the actual product, assuming the product meets a minimum threshold of quality. (See: the Mac user-base from around 1995-2005).
If the OUYA succeeds, which admittedly looks like a long shot for all the reasons described here and elsewhere, it will be due to capturing hearts and minds of devs and power users for the years it will take to gestate into a profitable platform, and not because it's the best value prop for either users or devs on day 1.
I like the post overall, but the tech analysis is really weak. It makes it look like you spent a few minutes reading specs on wikipedia and decided that was enough to compare and contrast the hardware. It's not, and that comparison doesn't really add anything to the post.
To properly compare the processors you need to note that they are using different instruction sets and that the 360's processors are in-order with hyperthreading. Are the ouya's cpu cores in-order or out of order? do they have hyperthreading? What's the memory latency like? How big are the caches?
To properly compare the GPUs you need to understand the major differences in architecture. The 360 didn't have '512MB of memory and 10MB of video memory'; it had 512MB of memory that was shared between CPU and GPU (which means extremely cheap direct access to memory used by the GPU - something with no analog in modern PC architectures) and then 10MB of extremely, extremely high-speed framebuffer EDRAM on the GPU. These two unusual design decisions meant that overdraw was nearly free on the 360 (because the framebuffer memory was so fast) and that you could use the GPU to help out with CPU computations or have the CPU help out with rendering because both could freely access each other's memory. The Ouya could have double the clock speed and memory of the 360 and still fail to run 360 games if it has no equivalent for those features, because if you have a GPU/CPU memory split, you can end up needing two copies (system memory and GPU memory) of data, and it becomes much more difficult to have the GPU and CPU assist each other.
Someone who's done development for the 360 with the native dev kit could probably provide more detail here, I've only used the XNA dev tools (so GPU access, but no native CPU access) - IIRC there are some other perks the 360 has like a custom vector instruction set that might also give it an advantage over similarly-clocked competitors.
Out of order, 1 MB of cache. I'm not too familiar with the GPU. Xbox360 most likely has higher performance, and this is why I was hoping they'd use as "beefed up" (no regard for power consumption) Tegra 4 instead of a beefed up Tegra 3.
Not sure what DirectX version Xbox is using but I know PS3 graphics are usually considered higher quality, and they're only using a slightly modified version of OpenGL ES 2.0, which is what Tegra 3 supports, too. Tegra 4 will support GLES 3.0, and they might surprise us with support for the full OpenGL 4.3, too, especially if built with Kepler DNA, but I'd say the chances are less than 50% for that.
But anyway, I think the comparisons with Xbox are rather pointless and people who do it "don't get it". Does the Wii really need to be compared with Xbox in performance? It seems millions of people bought it anyway.
and they're only using a slightly modified version of OpenGL ES 2.0
I read someplace - can't remember where exactly - that AAA PS3 games generally don't use OpenGL ES at all but instead use some kind of more direct access. There's also RSXGL, which implements the OpenGL 3.1 Core API.
> The current published sales record for XBLA was, oddly enough, Minecraft, which sold over a million units in a week. If I'm an indie looking to make money with a good game, that blows any Ouya potential out of the water.
You can't pick the biggest success for XBLA and use that as the only comparison point. Yes, Ouya won't be your console of choice if you are a AAA developer, or an indie developer with the kind of clout that notch has. But if you are an actually small-time dev, it'll be a lot easier to get onto Ouya and make a modest amount of money than it would be to get onto XBLA.
I hope it can be a tegra 4 console with a discrete gpu, something like geforce 660.
I'm as guilty as posting before thinking as the next guy, but this is really silly. We already know what's inside it: a Tegra 3 (probably a T33) using its on-die graphics hardware.
Making it sillier is the idea of bolting in a GeForce 660--I assume you want to pay $500 for the console just for the privilege of an underpowered CPU strapped to a GeForce 660?
"Games aren't thriving on Android"
Is that it? Not even a single example to back it up? Sounds like someone who doesn't even own an Android device.
I wouldn't describe it as thriving, however...
> First, there isn't a thriving Android game market, currently. That can change and I'm not going to offer a prediction, but for now it doesn't exist. Moving on.
"It doesn't exist" really does make the author sound like they haven't used an Android device in the last 3 years.
Finally, some rationality.
It's usually the people who aren't actually gamers or are otherwise familiar with the industry that will breathlessly praise Ouya. Usually people who are wantpreneurs dreaming of day when they live off selling digital snake oil.
That the Ouya would be experienced by them as an apotheosis of that is not surprising.
I've been gaming since I was 2 years old (NES). The kickstarters wasted their money. We already have open platforms, we're just ignoring them.
"Finally, some rationality."
You say that as if people haven't been pissing on the Ouya full time since its announcement. Right or wrong this is hardly a new view, nor did anything about it immediately leap out to me as being new or even an unusual opinion.
I agree with the rationality part and enjoyed the 'digital snake oil' statement.
However, I'd be happy if Ouya just creates a buzz for Android gaming. I couldn't care 2-shits for the box itself, but if playing Android games on the TV (through mirroring, through Google TV etc.) takes off, that'd be pretty neat for the Android ecosystem.
P.S. I could never put my finger on it, but something about the Ouya Kickstarter never felt right to me. If I had to guess, it was the scant tech. details and throwing Yves Behar's name around for credibility (although I think it does the opposite, the OLPC is a piece of shit). Naturally, many people thought otherwise.