My favorite thing is when she was bragging about a touch pad saying no one else had one and the interviewer says “the PlayStation has a touch pad no?” And her face just instantly drops 😭😭😭
I used my ouya a lot back in college. The small form factor just worked well in my dorm, and the "something is free and side loading is an option" worked great for "broke college student." I ended up using the touch screen a lot because a lot if the side loaded apps needed it. Fun story, I used my ouya to help preserve a delisted android game. In 2019 someone on the lost media wiki discord needed someone with an older version of android to see if the apk they had worked, and I booted up my ouya to see if it worked and it did. Don't remember the game, but I was like "I have an ouya, that has a version of android that's like 5 years old at this point so it's probably old enough," and now the game is preserved as far as I know.
@@headerahelix i might have a case of lost media on my old lenovo tablet its some kind of reactor management game that just involves you balancing 3 meters and 3 bars, with occasional maintenance thrown in It seems to have 2 endings as far as i know: - Decommissioned: The plant gets taken off the grid for producing too little power (the game even tells you that the plant needs to produce significant power) - Meltdown (which kinda scared me cause the core went from stable to meltdown): its obvious, but it had a red screen and EAS noise I have tried several times to find it, typing in several combinations of nuclear power plant, or reactor game and no luck I found a game titled nuclear reactor, but that is some wierd hypercasual game that had literally no sounds, and it spammed me with ads until i restricted the apps internet access Yeah, nuclear reactor is completely irrelevant to said lost game As far as i know it probably doesnt exist on the Play Store anymore I might try to put in a new battery into the Tablet, but its janky, slow and its also got pirated apks from the aptoide days (i was dumb back then, but smart enough to delete the games that brought up a PNG of a russian website)
@@headerahelixthe Tablet is probably like 10 years old, i will not plug it in until the battery is replaced Even then i would probably only do it in a smoorez style stream
I worked at Best Buy as a home theater supervisor during the time this thing released and I remember how this thing never sold and remember how a few months later the warehouse team were packing up dead stock and shipping it back out.
Wow, so y'all will actually send stuff back to the warehouse? I thought once it was at the store, that's it and the price just keeps dropping till someone takes it.
I think the biggest issue OUYA ever had was that they never had Google on board so there was no access to the Play Store. OUYA had to try and build their own game store. Which they ultimately sold to Razr and that too has been shutdown.
Incidentally, according to reviews of the Razer Forge TV that I remember seeing back then, one problem with it was that it could not run some Android TV apps from the Play Store (most notably the Netflix app) which worked just fine with the nVidia Shield TV. I'd say that media-streaming apps (and non-game software in general) were a missed opportunity for Ouya; unlike big-budget games, those things don't require high-performance hardware to run well, but the Ouya didn't have official support for many streaming services and its marketing focused on games first and foremost. And to make matters worse for Ouya, Steam was starting to support both indie games (with Steam Greenlight) and TV/living-room gaming (with Big Picture mode) at around the same time, thus making Steam a competitor to Ouya's app store.
Ouya is another notch on my personal list of "I was wrong". I saw Ouya and thought the same thing as I thought later on when I saw the AtariBox - "Oh gosh, an open platform that people can develop to resulting in an indie game paradise". And I am wrong every time.
the steam deck, for example, doesn't seem to suffer from this problem because it's not a new platform, just a new form factor for an already *very* successful one
@@wesleymays1931 Truth be told... the console that is the real indie game paradise is strangely becoming the Nintendo Switch. It's cheap to buy and there are loads of decent to great indie games on it for really cheap prices. Lots of crap too, obviously, but there is enough there to be impressive.
There isn't any reason to get one now unless it's super cheap or free but I still use mine as an emulation machine and for pretty much anything under N64 it works pretty good!
You were not so wrong, Ouya is now AndroidTV and the direct equivalent would be the Nvidia Shield. I use one (Nvidia Shield Pro) on every TV I have and they are the best for media and awesome for gaming, both android games and PC games via Nvidia service.
Julie is a prime example of all talk, all incompetent, two years at every company. Just long enough to put on your resume, and just short enough to prevent you from getting fired for not living up to your promises. Classic management bull and a major red flag.
“All incompetent” is currently not correct. They built a hardware product, shipped it on time and with relatively minor bugs. That in and of itself is remarkably uncommon. They mistimed the market and failed to bring the big titles like Minecraft. The demand for consoles like this just wasn’t there with the rise of phones.
@@Mrcaffinebean the hardware was basically a phone without a built in screen. A standard Android device. Nvidia would have given them the basic implantation. Even incompetent leaders often hire competent people to cover for them.
I always assumed this was intentional, since during the same presentation she said over and over again how "there is nothing special about this hardware." I'm not saying it was a great presentation, but I think the point they were trying to make was the Ouya was casual, friendly, not something to be intimidated about. Thus you could just pack it in a brown paper bag like your lunch. Given this was being marketed to a very casual crowd similar to the Wii, I kind of understand the marketing. Even if it wasn't done very well.
I was working for Target (not currently, I hate Target) during the time this was released. We didn’t sale a single unit. Even when the Ouya was on sale they didn’t move. Once they went on clearance for pennies they finally sold. I had a customer tell me he was buying it as a gag gift haha
Somehow I'm not convinced a giant company like sony was worried about stealing the thunder from a random upstart that wasn't directly competing with them @@bryanpope6573
Man, I've watched like twenty of these and you are definitely kindest and gave the nicest version of its history. Most videos start with the dumpster fire already in progress. Love it. Happy New Year!
Funny you say that. I never even heard of Maddy before this video, yet even I saw that drawing and thought: "I bet she doesn't look anything like that." All these uber-nerds with little anime-style avatars do that. Whether it's a woman or a dude. The actual person will look like Jabba the Hut, yet their little avatar looks like an anime-style super model 😂
Either that or the png of a character with a flag on the background, picrew pfp, etc 😂 it’s almost like the jokes wrote themselves at this point, I mean can you expect anything else from Celeste of all games? Damn near everyone who worked on that game were all the exact same lmao, and apparently the main character too. Usually you’ll find it’s trans people the most who get some poor Twitter artist to draw them looking like a cutesy anime girl when they look like Hulk Hogan irl, the Ricky Berwick meme explains it best lol.
Excellent and fair video on the OUYA. I loved the OUYA platform, and hated the controller. I've always said that the main reason for OUYA failing is because the people behind it (mainly Julie). It was way ahead of it's time. All in all, you said what I've said for years when getting into discussions about the OUYA, plus a bunch more I that never crossed my mind. Again, excellent video!
I had an ouya I bought used for $20 in 2014. Used it for about 5 years as a plex client for my non-smart TV. Not exactly the intended use case but it served me well.
I was one of the backers. One of the things that sucked was that those of us that paid for the "collector edition" were pushed to the back of the line at launch. Kind of insulting to be one of the bigger supporters and get told "Yeah, you paid extra so you are going to be the last to get your system"
People who never backed Ouya at all could just walk into Best Buy and get one, before the actual backers. There was so much that went wrong with the marketing, but that was one of the biggest.
The funniest thing about Ouya was all the Linux and OSS channels hyping it up as if it was going to single-handedly take down Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.
I got quite excited about the Indrema console back in 2000. That was a linux open source console that died. So I have some appreciation for that enthusiasm although I didn't share it with the Ouya. There was nothing about the Ouya that I saw to get me excited. It is yet another cheap android box.
The problem with Julie is I don't think she can "qualify" as a CEO of a game company. I mean, she also infamously blasted Tripe A games as overall meh (which while I get Tripe A games are mocked these days, still) and tried to market the OUYA at E3... _outside_ the building. Oh and she also presented the OUYA out of a simple brown bag (NOT plastic as I originally thought). That alone gave bad imprepssions of her and the console. Julie strikes me as similar to Sean of Hello Games (who created No Man's Sky), however unlike Julie, Sean actually _improved_ the game and listened to the criticisms and became a far better CEO.
I think people expected too much from Ouya also. People assumed it was going to be this dope console for hackers, but it was literally a phone in a cube. It wasn't her that made the Ouya not work. Hell, in spite of her, they still got a shitload of backers and raises a ton of money.
The problem with many of these "experts" is that they become experienced, supposedly, but do not stay long enough to be actually "seasoned", which takes real time, not just a couple of years enough to "check the box".
The controller latency was due to the fact that both the wifi signal and the Bluetooth signals was competing with each other all the while being partial blocked by the aluminum that made of the majority of the case. wifi connections was unstable as a result as well. If you disabled one or the other the one that you didn't disable would get a a lot better but was still very noticable (controller latency wasn't as bad, or the wifi connection wasn't as flakey), it wasn't until you took the board out of the ouya case that the wifi and Bluetooth issues pretty much went away.
I remember when the Ouya concept or Boxer8 was rumored in 2011 as a budget game console for people that just wanted to play new games at $100. I was sort of excited about it, but when they announced the system on kickstarter and the specs were underwhelming, I warned people to not support the Ouya! And Rich from RTU got duped into buying it and regretted it! The controllers were awful! Ouya was years late to the market, especially when the Wii dropped to $99 in 2013! That was way more enticing than the Ouya!
I was an early OUYA backer and even an admin on their official forums. It was a dark time in my life trying to convince myself that this thing had any legs. It's currently collecting dust in my closet.
I was in college back in 2013, I was in the video game dev club. One week, we got an email that Julie Uhrman was coming to campus to speak to the club. It was 60 minutes of just her hyping OUYA. It felt weird, soo many red flags about what she said. She said, they are developing an SDK that would be free for devs, Games will be free to try, they had partnership with AAA dev companies. She gave away some OUYA consoles to club members, I still have mine. I never really used it because of the overwhelming negative reviews online and from my fellow club members.
Glad to have helped out with the research for this episode! As usual, I'll provide a few interesting tidbits that weren't mentioned... - One of the first OUYA exclusives announced was a prequel to Human Element, which unfortunately never got released...nor did the main game for that matter. - OnLive (an early attempt at cloud gaming) was supposed to launch with the OUYA, but it ultimately never happened due to OnLive's financial difficulties at the time. - Vevo and iHeartRadio were supposed to launch their apps with the OUYA, but never did for unknown reasons. - Not too long after the OUYA came out, Muffi Ghadiali returned to Amazon to work on the highly successful Fire TV. He then went on to work in the electric vehicle charging industry, first with ChargePoint, before founding Electriphi, which is now known as Ford Pro Charging, after Ford acquired the startup in 2021. - One year after Razer acquired OUYA's assets, they acquired a company you may have heard of: THX. - As a Jackbox Games fan, it's worth noting that before June 2013, they used to be known as Jellyvision Games-their first title under the Jackbox Games banner was a port of You Don't Know Jack (2011) on the OUYA. They would later port that to the Amazon Fire TV, which also received a new, original game from them that would define their legacy: Fibbage. - It's possible to get a form of Linux running on the OUYA, specifically Debian and Ubuntu...with mixed results. More information can be found here: tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2014/03/24/ubuntu-on-ouya/
Saved me some money by just watching you for a few minutes but you really affirmed what I suspected all along. I’ve gotten burned so many times buying on line I've decided to stick to brick and mortar stores that have a history of staying power. If the store has been paying rent for decades on multiple stores across the country I figure they must be doing something right. Even if they're on the verge of bankruptcy some other company will likely buy them out or up and carry on with an even better an more improved pricing and marketing plan. They have after all just bought a history of mistakes & Failures along with what succeeds from what their own company is doing.
The Ouya was a concept before its time. With the recent boom in powerful but small SBCs today, a concept like this could potentially have more viability these days as opposed to back then. In fact, the modern 'equivalent' would be things like the NVIDIA Shield TV and other powerful gaming-capable Android boxes.
I remember when the OUYA was announced. A bunch of people I worked with at the time thought it was going to super take off, but it was so clearly not going to. The idea of a cheap console was too appealing for a lot of people to think about the viability of a console based on a mobile platform, especially back then.
Nintendo Switch is a mobile platform (Nvidia Tegra) .... it isn't the hardware that makes the biggest contribution ... it is the games you can bring to that console that will draw in the game players.
The OUYA had an NVIDIA TEGRA 3 chip in it and the NVIDA Shield handheld that came out around the same time also utilized a TEGRA chip and was very capable. Also, the Nintendo Switch, which came out a few years later, used a faster TEGRA X1 and is one of the best selling consoles of all time so I don’t think the issue was the mobile platform, especially considering how successful other mobile devices that utilized the same or similar mobile hardware and software platform were, such as the NVIDIA Shield line of gaming devices.
For those of you saying the Switch is a mobile platform, congrats, you’re some of the people who don’t get it. The Switch is not based on a mobile platform (Android), it’s a console that was made to be mobile. It was built from the ground up to be a premium console that was mobile, not to be a glorified mobile device that you couldn’t really use on the go. The OUYA was designed to run programs that were, in turn, designed to be used on mobile devices with touch interfaces. The Switch was designed to run games, and everything related to it (including dev kits) were based on that. Again, comparing the OUYA and the Switch is the same ignorant viewpoint that made people think the OUYA had a chance to begin with.
@@Ilix42 I used the Nintendo Switch as a secondary example of a successful Mobile Games system using similar mobile hardware as the OUYA but, was mostly comparing OUYA to the NVIDIA Shield Portable and the later Shield Console. Doing so because they were also both dedicated gaming devices utilizing an NVIDIA Tegra SoC and running an Android based OS, to show that there were successful hardware products that were both mobile based gaming systems running a mobile OS, specifically a slightly modified version of ANDROID like that of the OUYA, all on the same or similar NVIDIA TEGRA hardware platform built for other mobile and low-powered devices like the Shield and Switch. There’s no need to be so defensive or call people “ignorant”, especially considering that you’re the one who’s argument starts to fall apart at the mere mention of the existence of the NVIDIA Shield portable and console.
@@canthearu4876 Exactly. It's never been about the hardware and always about the games. People buy these things to play games, not to marvel at the megahertz and the gigabytes. The fact that the Switch succeeded while the Ouya and the Shield flopped is because they didn't just make a console then waited for devs to do the hard work. Nintendo made their own games and leveraged their existing relationships with devs to create a real gaming ecosystem. Ouya put the -cart- console ahead of the -horse- games.
I almost bought one of these and was upset when I missed out. Then, a few months later, I was so happy I missed out. The hype really was massive at the time. Hard to think this was so long ago, honestly.
I know I'm on the outside here, but I loved my Ouya. So many amazing hours spent playing In Plain Sight, Towerfall, and Knightmare Tower. It was compatible with literally every controller we had in the house, and it was a mainstay at all of our get togethers.
I feel like you missed another reason for the "failure". You mention how the games weren't selling very well, so developers weren't supporting the system. A large number of enthusiasts figured out that the Ouya was a cheap ready made emulation box, since it had the ability to be easily changeable with the root access. A LOT of Ouyas were turned into emulation boxes filled with ROMS. And none of those people bought any games. They just downloaded ripped roms. Why pay for new games when you can just play all those old games free forever.....and because of that, the developers kind of abandoned the system, leaving hardly any good games for normal people to buy, meaning no reason for them to buy the Ouya.
My old manager still teases me about reserving the Ouya at our GameStop store. "Could be worse, you could be the guy that ordered a second controller for it." Of which I was. XD
They're also was the white limited edition which fixed the latency issue of the controller by adding shielding, and a new Bluetooth chip. It also came with more ram.
A big issue when Ouya was announced is a whole lot of backers and developers wanted Ouya to use the Tegra 4 which was available, but they did not. If they would have used the Tegra 4, had more RAM, an SD card slot and more USB, dropped the controller and charged $99 for the main unit, Ouya would have ended up being an Emulation powerhouse like Mister is today.
I got two Ouyas to take apart and hack on. It was a pretty well executed bit of hardware for the price at the time (except the controllers which were junk). More could have been made of it with better management I think.
I was one of the early backers to Ouya, along with a lot of other people. I did have to wait a good period of time before I received mine, and I cannot remember how long, but my Ouya did eventually show up way before retail launch. I remember being unimpressed and not being about to do much. I also remember the UI being buggy. I sold it 3 or 4 weeks later to a couple of guys, and they were shocked that I had one so early. I sold it for $130 or $140 and maybe a little money off of it.
I remember people super hyped at the launch. I was always confused since it basically just seemed like a cell phone platform without any of the convenience.
I had an Ouya. Honestly I really liked it, too. It was a decent little emulation machine and streaming box. I don’t know where it is now, but that was $100 well spent, in my opinion
I was one of the kickers. It died because they didn't fund development. I wish it was still possible to get and run stuff on it. Two year managers are the curse of all development. They can hype stuff up but they're completely incapable of following through. AND thank you for pointing out the controller battery -- I hadn't touched mine since shortly after it arrived, and never opened the battery. Fortunately the alkaline batteries hadn't rotted out.
Great video. I didn’t realize it was such a complicated story. I almost bought one, but wanted to wait to see how the platform developed, then I started getting the sense that Julie didn’t really know what she was doing. “Fakin it until you make it” is exactly the vibe I was getting (not at first, though), and it quickly appeared it was going to under deliver. I guess I was hoping that developers would find a way to make it compelling, but that never panned out. That being said, had it been introduced for the first time today, using today’s technology available at that price point (or maybe $149-199), and focusing more so on using the Google Play Store and Steam, then I think it would be pretty successful… though more likely to be a dockable portable device, like many of the Switch inspired devices we see today. of course, no one would trust that brand again, so it’s too late for it to make a resurgence.
It is what it is selling right now. The Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go... They took the idea that Ouya was offering, and make it work.
I backed that kickstarter, when it arrived i remember setting it up and downloading 20+ GAME DEMOS. Every game sucked. I came back to it a few times and downloaded over 100 demos. I never found a game worth buying. I found it in a drawer when doing a clean out a month ago and tossed it. Such a disappointment.
The jawbone jambox was AWESOME!!!! I still have two of my original ones and a few of the subsequent minis that came out. Bot a lot of 4 from eBay. Had problems updating the firmware due to support shutting down. Had to find it on a file sharing site.
As a former Ouya game dev, it had promise..... but...... the controller was TERRIBLE! The OG console had an aluminum chassis that made the Wifi and BT struggle to get a good signal. Pair with an aluminum cover for the controller and connection was so spotty. The joysticks also sucked and were difficult to get a grip with them. Software was decent, the Tegra 3 was good enough, but man was it poorly designed. They did eventually come out with a pull plastic console that helped, but it was too late.
Ouya Backer - I used it like a couple of days before I stopped bothering. It really ran kind of crap in my experience, and whilst they might eventually improve it, it was a terrible first impression. And yes, Julie seems at least a significant part of the problem leading to its demise. It's just not a good sign when a key figure in the company, the face of it really, has a history of bouncing from company to company, not sticking around more than a couple years or so. There are legitimate reasons for making repeated moves like that, like getting pay bumps as other companies recognize you're worth more than you're currently being paid, but generally it just makes it look like she probably had good specs on paper (education, working at recognized companies in decent positions, etc.), but the fact that none of the companies were keen to hold on to her seems telling. In those samples, she seems a hype agent that didn't bother to actually pay close enough attention to the product she was hyping, or the market.
What's absolutely wild to me is that the power socket is on top above the other ports. It makes more sense to me to have it on the bottom. Anywho, I do like the looks of the thing, but i never believed in it's lasting power. it was doomed to be outdated quite quickly.
I was a kickstarter for Ouya. I asked for a refund after numerous delays, and them shipping to retail before their kickstarter supporters. Seems I got my refund just in time.
I think the Ouya died because it really *was* "nothing special". They put phone hardware in a box and tried to sell that as a console. When you're competing against Sony and Microsoft, that's not going to fly. Sure, you weren't paying PlayStation or Xbox money for the privilege, but you were only getting games proportional to what you paid.
I think it could've done better if it wasn't for all the overpromises. But yeah even then it just wasnt good hardware no matter the price, especially that controller.
My impression is that the product was in quality range with many other first generation tech products, which are often questionable and bleeding edge. This one does not stand out as product that was designed to fail because it was far far worse than other companies that have products that fail, or products that go one to be successful after being improved.
Ah! I got curious and decided to see if my Ouya still worked and it sure does. I remember doing the new server modification when it was first launched, to my surprise everything is still up and running haha
I backed the Ouya on Kickstarter, but when I received it I was just getting ready to start post graduate schooling and didn't think I'd have time to mess around with a maker toy/budget game console. Thankfully I was able to sell my console in the window between Kickstarter backer shipments and regular market shipments. Every news article I ever saw about Ouya made me glad I made that decision. Even going in, I had no illusions it'd be great. I just wanted to mess around with android and couldn't afford a tablet ($200+ for the worst ones at the time) or afford a data plan for a smart phone. But the bad controller and functionally dead ecosystem would've made it complete e-waste for me. Couldn't even be a good emulation box because of the controller
One thing I never got behind: how it looks. Why does it look so cheap? Like those horrible counterfeit brandless video game consoles you could get for 20 to 50 dollars.
I owned an ouya. I wanted it to succeed because i believed in the concept of a mobile chip microconsole with accessibility and affordability as the front and center ideology 10 years later and I believe in that concept even more, now that mobile chips are actually fairly impressive and the implementation of controller friendly games on Mobile platforms is bigger than it's ever been But you know what killed it for me on the ouya? For starters, i only started to enjoy it after i plugged in an xbox 360 controller... And later it became the box that was only busted out for towerfall when we had friends over
Microconsoles are a dumb concept. Like, what audience are they even aimed at? Who wants to plays phone quality games on TV? If you're a gamer you'll want to play core games on a PC or a full-fledged game console. If you're a casual you'll be fine with gaming on your phone.
Value was a huge part of the problem for this. 99 bucks for this would have also bought you a Raspberry Pi kit and controller with much better performance. Sure, you needed to do a bit more work, but in the end you would have had a much better user experience. I still use my Pi 2b to this day, but the Ouya remains on my shelf collecting dust.
I still think the greatest use of the Ouya was as the villainous mcguffin device in animator Jason Steele's #1 hit action movie Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom. Now available in full on youtube. That man truly is a visionary.
Epic presentation as always. I actually stumbled across my Ouya cleaning out a cupboard recently - a wave of temporary nostalgia followed - briefly. There were some genuinely great games on the platform. The try before you buy approach also held the console back, more work for the developers with no benefits to them.
I'm from Southeast Asia, and I was still a student when the OUYA came out. I remember my friend kept telling me that OUYA would change gaming forever. I told him that all the games would probably come to Steam and the PS Store, and he'd be better off waiting for the PS4 Slim. Eventually, he did buy a PS4 Slim.
I'm surprised the "delivering boatloads of units to storefronts LONG before delivering units to the Kickstarter backers" point didn't make it in! They lost a LOT of trust, pulling a move like this so early in the game. What a shame. It was so close to being a fun little machine. Instead, they'd let just ANYONE post ANYTHING to their OUYA store. I remember SO much shovelware in there. Finding a game that even functioned was sometimes difficult. Thanos for another banger of a video!
I remember the general reaction to the Ouya being "You can play Android games on the TV! It'll be so easy to get indie and retro games on it, just like the Play Store!" Which was true, and was a good thing. And then it came out and everyone realized "Oh, it's just phone games on the TV..." Like, it did what it promised but it turns out people didn't want what it promised nearly as much as they thought. A lot of good ideas and ambitions, but ultimately just wasn't a product people wanted, along with a variety of other mistakes.
Yeah, I'm not normally one to brag about seeing the writing on the wall but even during the initial hype I never got why the Ouya was being seen as so exciting when it was really just a funny shaped Android tablet, tbh this retrospective actually showed it was a bit *more* successful than I remembered
Almost everyone who bought one of these had a superior gaming console in their home already, and the real nerds could do the same thing cheaper. This was always going to fail without significant support from Google.
Julia leaving companies every couple of years says a lot about her. Possibly she got wind of her going to be canned and she left on her own before that could happen. She seems like a couple of executives that came to work for company I worked for. They came in with a bunch or new ideas and excitement, which a lot of us saw the BS after a year and both of them didn’t last 2 years. One left on their own and the other was asked to leave.
One of the major problems is the attach rate. See, many people bought the Ouya intending it to be an emulation box. That part of the market did not buy games. The statistic for how many games purchased by each Ouya owner was, iirc, less than 1. No developer is going to make games for a platform where the average customer has no intention of buying anything. And it deprived Ouya of an ongoing revenue stream.
"maddy thorson" may make ok games, but he pushes "gender identity" politics with every game, for instance, he claims his characters are all trans. even though none of that has anything to do with playing games or any relevance to games in general as people do not play games for the politics or religious bs, they play for entertainment. there is nothing entertaining about people pushing their beliefs and politics into your face. idc what people want to believe they are even if nature and reality is a dictatorship and not open for debate and they still want to believe whatever that is fine. but when you go and try to force everyone else to ascribe to those beliefs under the pretense of somehow they are bad/immoral/evil if they don't want to feed into any mentally ill delusions brought on by early childhood traumas that no one should have to go through, that is evil in itself imo.
The physical form factor caused problems for me. The positions of the cables on the back combined with a small footprint usually resulted in the unit tipping backwards, particularly if the HDMI cable was a decent size. And yes, the controller was just horrible to use.
I remember reading an interview with one of the engineers: They expected Android devices to remain cheap and low-powered, but there was a sudden jump in the power of ARM chips before the device went into production, but after they had acquired a supply contract. Additionally, many devs didn't want to make apps just for a single Android device, let alone a "free" game that requires significant infrastructure to generate profit from MTX.
You missed the worst thing about the controolers, which was that the face buttons would sometimes get stuck under the faceplate. I still liked my Ouya.
I bought a founder's special edition ouya day one...even had the fancy laser engraved controllers. ...I used it once, and it then sat completely and forever unused. I think I blame the controller the most.
babe wake up, Ken made a video on the ouya. the ouya has a special connotation for me because when it was announced i was working for a small company that made mobile games and the idea of a console that was friendly to indies was enticing. alas they played the company like icarus.
I think part of the reason major companies stopped making Android TV boxes is because so many of them are coming from noname companies into your local Walmart. If you can get one from a basket at Walmart for $30, why get one for$100?
they shipped the dev kit LATE, without the promised and hyped API which was the main selling feature, telling all dev's who paid the full $699 for the consoles "Real dev's don't need no stinking api", the very thing they were paying for.
Why are tech companies always run so poorly, and by scammers? Like these are the people that would scoff at people for not having a full savings account.
Great video. From my time with the Ouya, it was the lack of Google Play store support. There were tons of Android games that had controller support back then. Many gamers saw Ouya as a $100 Android game console that was walled gardened, and locked out of a ridiculous amount of android games. What made the Steam Deck a success was the fact that it was a device launched into an already fleshed out gaming ecosystem. That could have been Ouya, but nope.
