Ouya CEO Talks Console's Tough First Year, and Ambitious "Ouya Everywhere" Plan

Nerval's Lobster writes "As founder and CEO of the Ouya (pronounced "OOO-yah") game company, Julie Uhrman's mission has been to lure gamers back to their living room televisions. Touch-screen gaming on a smartphone or tablet is nice, she suggests, but a big screen, coupled with the precision of a controller with buttons and analog sticks, offers the best platform for immersive, emotionally engaging experiences. Soon enough, though, you shouldn't need an Ouya console to play Ouya games. Later this week, Uhrman plans to announce 'Ouya Everywhere,' an initiative to bring Ouya games to television sets that aren't connected to Ouya hardware. As a company, Ouya remains vague about just how Ouya Everywhere will work; but in an interview with Slashdot, Uhrman provided a rough idea of what to expect: 'It could be another set-top [box],' she said. 'It could be the TV itself. There's a number of different ways that games can be played on the television, and we're actively exploring all of them.' To be clear, Ouya isn't getting out of the hardware business. The company has promised relatively frequent hardware refreshes, and already upgraded the original Ouya's controller to address early complaints. The next version of the Ouya hardware 'at a minimum will have a higher performing chipset,' she said. 'We have done a lot of work on our controller and we feel like there is even more work to do. Those are the two big things we're focused on.' But while her company builds hardware, Uhrman insists that Ouya is 'really a software company. The largest team inside Ouya is software engineers.' (Ouya has 49 employees, 19 of them engineers.) Ouya arrived with great fanfare in 2012, after a $950,000 Kickstarter campaign met its goal in just eight hours. The fundraiser ended up raising $8.6 million, and Kickstarter backers received their consoles in March 2013."

Re:Ouya just isn't compelling

[prelelat]

Your making it sound like a scam. First of all vapourware is something that never ships this did. Second of all they explained the goals and hardware of the device which they have met the hardware goals, though I don't think the software is exactly where it should be. Basically they want to be steambox with android as the OS. It's not a terrible goal but they needed more titles and backing from developers not just people buying it for a set top box that happens to play games. Which is pretty much what people are using it for now it would seem.

Re:Ouya just isn't compelling

[fsck-beta]

Actually with the iOS 7 controller support, this has been rumoured for the next generation AppleTV for quite some time. All sources point to an overhaul of the AppleTV later this year as well, likely related.

It's a good media player

[RKThoadan]

I got mine mostly for a xbmc media player and occasional gaming. It took a little while for them to work the kinks out with the xbmc folks, but it's pretty stable now. We play games very rarely.

I think their policy that all games must have a free trial of some kind may be hurting them, and encouraging in-app purchase games, which I can't stand. I think it would be a great market for retro-classics, but I really don't want to think about someone making Pac-Man with a trial version.

Audio latency and amateur hour

[tepples]

I can see two reasons why major game developers might decline to port games to OUYA. One is Android's almost audio latency, which is far too high for some genres. Another is that some developers just don't want to be on the same platform as amateur hour.