What Happened to the Ouya?
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on July 20, 2024, 9:19 a.m. by DemonDragonJ
Several years ago, in the early to mid 2000's, a manufacturer was developing a new video game console called the Ouya, which, according to their claims, would be completely different from any other console that was released around that time and revolutionize video gaming, but, for all of that hype, the Ouya fizzled out very quickly, made no real impact, and is now largely forgotten, so I wonder why it failed.
For those here who are experts in video gaming history, how would the Ouya have revolutionized video gaming, if it had succeeded, and why did it fail? I certainly would be interested to hear everyone's responses, to this subject.
It never was going to be revolutionary - that was all a marketing pitch. The software was an Android system… that worked great on phones, but had performance issues when used for something it was not designed for. The hardware was garbage, with the controller buttons getting stuck regularly. Because the system had no market share, developers did not waste their time making content for it - and a game system without many games is hardly useful.
Frankly, like many “revolutionary technology” products on Kickstarter, this product felt more like a scam than a real product. It did nothing new - and the old things it did, it did badly.
July 20, 2024 3:45 p.m. Edited.
DemonDragonJ says... #4
Noire_Samhain, Caerwyn, both of those explanations make sense.
July 20, 2024 4:26 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #5
Is it possible that there’s also the problem of companies generally going in the direction of not actually selling physical media any more? Did that doom new (for lack of a better term) “old-world” systems from sprouting up? Ones we never even heard of? It’s a pretty significant shakeup to the paradigm...
Noire_Samhain says... #2
It was running on Android software that couldn't in anyway keep up with modern gaming even at the time, while also being hard for developers to work with. Not to mention, there was a severe lack of quality filter for games being released on it and very little advertising for the system itself.
Developers were also basically expected to work on tips, which doesn't really motivate people to develop games for your system. Yeah there are a lot of developers who care about the games they make- but they also need to make a living in order to keep developing.
July 20, 2024 3:31 p.m.