Ouya Console launching June 4, coming with 104 games

Quote :

After a remarkably successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $8 million last June, the startup will release its eponymous Ouya game console to retailers on June 4, it said on Thursday evening. The $99 box aims to disrupt the television gaming market the way that the iPhone upended the world of portable games, by allowing any developer to craft inexpensive games. Based on an Android chipset, Ouya aims to keep costs low and encourage innovation in a way that traditional competitors can’t.

Wired got its first hands-on time with a finished Ouya at the San Francisco offices of fuseproject, the design firm of Yves Behar, who created the tiny metal cube that houses Ouya. It’s still a little rough around the edges (there was a bit of controller lag and some crashes) but CEO Julie Uhrman seemed totally at peace with that. Ouya is going out to its “earliest backers” beginning today, and she says these early owners will be able to “watch the UI evolve to where it will be by June 4.”

As of right now, it’s just fun to hold an Ouya. One doesn’t expect a game console to come in such a tiny form factor. It’s deliberately underpowered, of course, but as of now that just seems to be leading developers to create pretty 2-D imagery or use simpler polygonal models, instead of trying to force the hardware to render things it wasn’t built for. The interface is simple, just a menu of four words: Play, Discover, Make and Manage. The latter lets you adjust the system settings; the first is a list of the games you own. It’s in the middle two options where things get interesting.

It’s common knowledge in the world of iOS apps that you get noticed in one of two ways: Get featured in the store via Apple’s secretive process of internal curation, or (by hook or by crook) get onto the top-grossing or most-downloaded charts.

“We don’t think downloads or revenue are good indicators of what a good game is,” Uhrman says. To that end, Ouya is crafting its own automatic algorithm that will determine whether or not a game is any good, based on other players’ behaviors. How many times have they played it? For how long are they playing it? When a player turns on their Ouya, is it the first game they immediately boot up? All of these factors will influence how prominently games are positioned in the Ouya marketplace when a player clicks on “Discover.”

There will also be an element of hand-picked curation on Ouya. That process, Uhrman says, will be led by Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Journey creator thatgamecompany and now Ouya’s head of developer relations. All new games will go into an area called the “Sandbox,” and will be pulled up into the “Recommended” feed after they hit the jackpot on the automated fun algorithm, or are selected by Santiago’s team.

Sources: http://mashable.com/2013/03/29/ouya-console-starts-shipping/
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/03/ouya-launch-date/

:fuckthat:

Looks interesting, but I'll pass on this.

I'm pretty sure this is going to flop hard.

Duke wrote:

I could care less about Android games, so I will not being wasting my time buying this.

It's not meant to play android games.

That's our Duke.

Also, it's "I couldn't care less", not "I could care less".

C- for effort, though. :lulzsec:

BEYONDinFamous wrote:

Also, it's "I couldn't care less", not "I could care less".

C- for effort, though. :lulzsec:

fauk yuo

I like how you edited your comment due to the massive failure it consisted of. Nice try, though.

BEYONDinFamous wrote:

I like how you edited your comment due to the massive failure it consisted of. Nice try, though.

Funny.