Ouya Android Console Blows Past Kickstarter Goal 270
mikejuk writes with a winner for quickest follow-up in a while as the Ouya console managed to raise over $2 million in a mere eight hours. From the article: "On the surface it all sounds like a really good idea. The OUYA games console is planned to be an open competitor to the likes of Xbox and PS3. It seems so good that it has been crowd funded to the tune of $1 million — but why exactly is it needed? There must be a good reason — after all the wisdom of crowds is never wrong. The simple answer seems to be freedom. The company claims that you can do what you want to the machine. A CyanogenMod port would allow you to do what you like to the OS and it wouldn't void your warranty. You can hack the hardware or software. However, it is important to note that this isn't open hardware. ... In the same way the software seems to be open and yet controlled. ... The Kickstarter page says 'When we say, "open" we mean it. We've made many decisions based on this philosophy:..' But it isn't Open Source. And yet it is so much better than the alternative. Perhaps this is a sign of just how desperate we all are to get away from the control of the big console manufacturers, that we will fund anything that sounds even slightly reasonable. The walled gardens of Apple, Sony and Microsoft no longer seem the warm and welcoming places they once did (if they ever did)"
Issues not raised on yesterday's post; the console will require a significant number of binary blobs just to function, and it's really unclear whether or not it will actually be DRM free. Anyone remember Indrema?
A vote against (Score:4, Interesting)
I think people like the convenience of consoles, mainly. Turn them on, and bang, you're playing in a moment. The locked-in hardware means that everything you run on it will be compatible, or updates will be auto-installed.
However, we've gotten sick of the console-makers' sense that somehow they OWN us as customers, and can reach further and further into our lives to control the console experience downstream.
If I mod my console, that's MY BUSINESS, not the hardware-sellers. I don't think anyone would object to the developers saying "ok then that voids your warranty" - that's fair. But when they push updates that then (pretty obviously deliberately) break modding, brick systems, and contrive to rope us back into their definition of what we should be doing with their systems, we resist and look for alternatives.
Which is why I hope this works, but its main impact will be in policy, not product. It's a vote against the proprietary walled-garden mentality of the big hardware makers. PERHAPS they'll see that a console player just wants to play the damned games, not become part of the dev's 'family'.
A Kickstarter Console for Kickstarter Games! (Score:5, Interesting)
Scam-like points of note (Score:5, Interesting)
At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:
This has a lot of "too-good-to-be-true" tempered by some things to make it seem reasonable. But with the promises made, I'm not sure. "Estimated Delivery: March 2013" is awfully soon to manufacture a console with presumably no prior hardware development experience. Do they have all their contracts already lined up? Is their software already developed? Just look how long it took to get the OpenPandora [wikipedia.org] out.
All of this starts making you wonder "wait, is this really legit?" I certainly can't say it's not, but it seems either naive or too good to be true.