[dpcan]

My take-away from this article was that if every OUYA shipped with a $10-$25 gift card or starting account balance, people would get into it a lot easier, and not box it up after a week.

Most consoles ship with full games. If the OUYA is only shipping with free trials, they aren't really competing.

Side-note, the home page of their website, what are they thinking? It looks like a stop sign. Or a "come back later". I literally went to their site earlier this year and thought it wasn't live yet, didn't bother going any further - until today. Shoot, it might as be one of those giant red circles with a line through it saying "go away!"

[damon_c]

"the home page of their website, what are they thinking?"

You're right... this should be put in the 'bad ideas' portfolio for web design instructors to use in future lessons.

Even after you know that it is not a "come back later", it still feels wrong and awkward having to ignore your natural instincts to leave, as you look past the big red circles and explore the site!

[pbhjpbhj]

You mean the http://ouya.tv website?

Didn't think it was quite that bad - a red tinted smiley face.

What I did see $99 - made me assume that it was only available in USA. Turns out you can get it in UK/CA. UK price is ~$170.

[sp332]

Just a note, every game in the Ouya store has a free trial or some kind of free mode. You can download every game & start playing it right away, then choose to pay to unlock the rest of it later. Of course some games are completely free, but they're generally not very polished.

[kevingadd]

This may have been true at launch, but it is false now:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/213775/Ouya_ditching_prob...

Just another ill-fated and ill-considered promise from the Ouya staffers. Unfortunate; I liked it on principle.

[jonny_eh]

OUYA engineer here (not PR).

Developers kept telling us that requiring a free component was discouraging them from publishing.

Since we changed our stance on that issue we've received a large influx of new and awesome games. So while it might not seem ideal from a gamer's perspective at first, the availability of a lot more games is pretty nice.

[MichaelGG]

What is their rationale? I saw one rant on Reddit where the dev was angry that OUYA forced him to give away his work for free and people would just play a demo then never pay. Are they all like that? As I understood, the technical implementation is fairly straightforward, right?

[ijk]

> As I understood, the technical implementation is fairly straightforward, right?

As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the technical and design challenges of offering a working subset of a game as a demo can be quite high for a small developer. Even AAA studios can't always justify the cost.

[sp332]

Oh :( I didn't think it was that ill-considered. Since the rest of the platform was designed to be very developer-friendly, it was nice to have a few pieces that were friendly to players.

[kevingadd]

The core problem is that it appears player-friendly, but in practice it is not, because it wounds developers. If you're an indie with limited resources, being forced to build a demo means you end up having to ship a bad demo (actually reducing your sales in many cases) or not ship on the platform at all.

In an ideal world, 'all games have free trials' is good. The realities of game development mean that even for games where it's possible to build an excellent trial, it may not happen. Budget cuts happen, resources you thought you had go away, your schedule slips or deadlines draw closer - in those scenarios, it would be unreasonable to make the core game suffer in order to have a demo ready by the deadline. Most developers would instead focus on the most important part - the core game, the thing people are paying for.

There are also games for which it is near-impossible to build a free trial. A recent example is The Stanley Parable; the nature of the experience made it impossible to have a 'free trial' version of the game, so they had to instead build an entirely separate game that they then gave away for free, and tried to use to convince people to buy the actual game.

That solution worked great for them, but it took time and resources. I wouldn't be able to bring myself to tell every developer they had to do that just to be on my store.

Note that demos and trials are great when they work: They help convert slight interest into sales. However, many successful games sell entirely on the strength of good reviews, word of mouth, and press coverage. This is part of why sometimes the wisest choice is not to have a demo.

[sp332]

You can just add a timer, like Bomberman did, or limit the number of levels or something. I played a puzzle game where the free version was limited to a certain number of moves per day. A timer would have worked fine for The Stanley Parable.

[ollysb]

Maybe OUYA could take care of this automatically, just freeze the game after the time limit had been hit. The developer could just specify how long they want the trial to be.

[ericd]

I'm very reluctant to buy a game if there's no demo, unless it's throwaway-cheap, the reviews and word of mouth are stellar (they're usually not for any but the biggest hits), or the concept immediately clicks for me. It's worth putting a bit of time into making a good demo.

[sexmonad]

I take this sentiment a bit further - unless it's throwaway-cheap, the reviews and word of mouth are stellar (they're usually not for any but the biggest hits), or the concept immediately clicks for me, I will pirate the game to try it out. If I like the pirated version, I _usually_ purchase the full game (but not always). Not having reasonable demos just increases game piracy.

[dpcan]

That's exactly the problem.

When I bought the Wii U for my kids, if they got to the end of the new Super Mario world and I had to go pay $N.NN to unlock the rest I'd have a really bad taste in my mouth.

What about at least including a couple awesome titles with the console? They are all around $1 to $10 (ish) right? Heck you could include 4 A-list titles where I only get ONE with a major console.

Just saying... nobody is blinded by the "free to try" idea. All that means is that I will need to spend MORE money before it's fun.

[sp332]

The Wii U costs $300 and includes 2 games. The Ouya costs $100 and comes with no games. So pretend the Ouya costs $200 and comes with $100 in store credit - it's still $100 cheaper.

[Pxtl]

Point. At launch, the Nexus 7 included $25 of Play money.

[donw]

It's pretty much an example of everything to not do on a landing page.