In a document that was leaked to Fortune.com the CEO of OUYA, Julie Uhrman has put out a call looking for potential buyers to rescue the company from what appears to be some fairly significant venture debt incurred with investment firm TriplePoint Capital. As is unfortunately the way of life and business these days, some dreams come crashing down as quickly as they shot to success and OUYA is one of these stories.
The Android based gaming console made a big splash when it landed on Kickstarter with 63,416 backers which includes several Ausdroid staff; pledging a total of US$8,596,474 to help bring this project to life. An outstanding effort for any project to get off the ground but to smash their targets like this was no doubt beyond the wildest dreams of the creators.
After the initial sales on Kickstarter promising so much, OUYA failed to find any foothold in the market with dated hardware and look (by the time it was eventually delivered and no second generation has been seen or heard of), disappointing performance, very little by way of recognised developer adoption and competitor products that in many cases offer better functionality and newer hardware.
Personally, aside from people who’ve loaded XBMC on their OUYA I don’t know of anyone whose console isn’t a $100 reminder to stop buying stupid stuff on Kickstarter.
If you bought an OUYA is it gathering dust, an XBMC player or have you found another practical use for yours?
I was using it for plex, netflix and moonlight (nee limelight). I’m hoping to replace it with the shield android tv…
Played a ton of Towerfall on it. Then Towerfall came out on PC and PS4. No reason to own an Ouya anymore. Eventually sold mine in late 2014 for $100 AUD, console with 2 controllers.
so much potential, pitty they made a couple of bad mistakes, like not having an open bootloader.
and yes other than the kids playing the crazy frog game some times its just gathering dust.
Great idea, problem is that people who backed it have only used it for emulators or XBMC (me included).
Not spent one cent at their store 🙁 lets hope someone breaths new life into Ouya with a winning direction.
I think I bought one or two games from their store to see how it worked.
I didn’t like the fact that the “demo” versions of the games immediately (before I’d even played a single game or understood what the game was even about) started hitting me with ads suggesting I buy the full game.
Basically, they needed to make publishing an app to Ouya’s store as simple as publishing to Play, but they couldn’t crack that and so developers preferred to publish to the larger market in Play.
Agreed,and with Google TV on the way to gaining popularity….
The gaming console built into the TV is an untapped market, some TV’s already have the required specs,so would just be a software problem also Ouya is in the unique position and could make a profit sharing deal with the TV manufacturer.
Anyway I hope Ouya finds away to survive.