Ouya first garnered headlines earlier this month when a report began to circulate that a cheap, free-to-play-centric, Android-based console would be coming to market for $99. Backed by Ed Fries, who played a prominent role in the development of the Xbox, and designed by Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar, this seemed relatively notable and legitimate. A pitch for the project then showed up on Kickstarter earlier this week where it managed to attract nearly $1 million in less than a day. As of this writing, that figure is up to nearly $4.5 million with 26 days to go, an impressive feat considering it was seeking $950,000 — a lot by Kickstarter standards, but not very much considering this is a console, not a game. There’s clearly a lot of excitement surrounding the system, though I’m finding it difficult to see a promising future for it based on what we’ve seen and heard so far.
In fact, there are so many different concerns I have that it’s difficult to even know where to begin. As the pitch video below explains, Ouya (“OOO-yah,” since you were no doubt wondering) is all about providing gamers with a cheap, open console that allows them to play free-to-play games on their television. Examining the Kickstarter immediately highlights one misleading detail in that description, which is the notion that the games will all be free-to-play. Ouya’s definition of this model is not one where the majority of the game is freely accessible and microtransactions support it, but one where something is playable for free. In other words, having a demo and then allowing players to purchase the full thing — you know, like every game on Xbox Live Arcade — would be enough to classify a game as free-to-play. Gamers who are still averse to the F2P model may be pleased to hear this (and to those people, I’d recommend you check out Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and Tribes: Ascend to see free-to-play isn’t so bad), but it’s just one of several points I take issue with.
