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by mattmanser 5077 days ago
How much did MS spend on just getting market penetration with the XBox? Wasn't it over a billion? Do you not get how this market works? Do you not remember the Dreamcast? There are massive, colossal flops in the console market out there. How long before MS even started posting a profit?

On the one hand it'd be awesome if they pull it off.

On the other hand they have pretty pictures of controllers, mock ups and what seems like a very delusional CEO. This has all the potential of killing kickstarter forever. Watching the original video makes you think they've actually got f all at the moment and $5 mill's a tiny drop in the ocean for actually making a dent in the console market. And worse than that they've promised $99 consoles before actually manufacturing it.

But the Android angle and the massive free publicity they're getting, they could just pull it off. But their promotional video really gives me nothing but doubts.

2 comments

The Dreamcast was only a failure compared to Sony and Nintendo. If Ouya sells 10 million consoles and has hundreds of games I think it would qualify as a success by their non-AAA goals.
Wait: im assuming they have a working prototype.

If no, that would be shocking.

"And how far along are you in building OUYA?

Very. We expect to have a finished product ready to ship to you in March. (With the very first boxes – bugs and all – ready a few months earlier.)

We have a functional prototype, and we have almost completed our industrial design (the shape and materials of the product you see here)...."

That said any Tegra 3 device with 1 GB ram and a bluetooth game controller could qualify as a prototype.

I'm going to agree with mattmanser's skepticism. Ouya is exciting and I suppose I'm rooting for it but I'm 80% sure the last station for this train is CrunchPad-ville.

Ultimately Tegra 3 delivers a level of console graphics that's 8 years old. I may be wrong but it looks like no motion gaming is mentioned nor a big content solution, and those are literally they biggest console advances over the last 8 years.

Did we watch a different video?

I saw a lot of mock ups. I saw no working console.

But admittedly perhaps I'm just a cynic who only saw the worst case scenario. I only watched their launch campaign on kickstarter and have no idea where they're at but to me it looked a lot like a bunch of mock ups of what they want, not what is.