The nice thing about OUYA being based on Android, is that developers can either make a game for "Android" and then just tweak it to run well on OUYA and with the controller, or they can make a game "specifically" for OUYA, and then just port it to all Android devices. So either way they can get access to a huge user base for the same game, regardless of how big OUYA's base is.
Google could've had this advantage as well with Google TV, but they never cared about making Google TV a console, or better yet, a "console platform". Too bad. I'm hoping OUYA succeeds, although I still can't get myself to buy one unless it has a 2013-worthy mobile chip inside.
With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten-foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games.
This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent or want cheap, bad games. If they bothered to study what has come before,they would have looked at the difficulty of a good port from the 360 to WP7 via DNA. But either they didn't our they did and want is to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Oh--and they want to release for April 2013 and have zero developer documentation. Reminds me why these guys are seen as being on the up and up?
Because people are desperate for this to be realistic, the same way people pumped money into Diaspora, even though it was backed by a team that's never shipped product before, that all just recently left college.
I want Ouya to succeed, but I just don't see how it can happen. They are extremely aggressive both on schedule and pricing, and more than that, the team has no experience shipping consumer electronics - and hardware manufacturing is a huge, huge expertise in and of itself.
So you have a very, very inexperienced team trying to ship a consumer electronics device faster and cheaper than pretty much any other experienced manufacturer who have been doing this for decades.
I'm not sure if most backers realize quite how big of a leap this is.
I'm not sure the people behind Ouya are as inexperienced as the ones behind Diaspora. At least they somehow got Yves Behar to help with the industrial design.
This is why I think Ouya won't succeed even if it ships. In terms of game design, most games on Android are based entirely on touch input or sensor input (e.g. accelerometer), not game pad input. How many games can realistically use both control schemes effectively? I think it will turn out to be much more like how devs design around keyboard vs. gamepad for games that are both on consoles and PC, one will be preferred over another.
More fundamentally, many apps and games on the Android market don't support the extra large screen category that Google TV uses and therefore won't install. Of apps and games that do install, many do not test for a 10' experience. We've seen that with tablets it took quite some time and a lot of hardware sales to get devs interested in making tablet layouts, so I'm not sure that the base of people interested in Ouya will be enough to have devs even look at the TV experience.
Google could've had this advantage as well with Google TV, but they never cared about making Google TV a console, or better yet, a "console platform". Too bad. I'm hoping OUYA succeeds, although I still can't get myself to buy one unless it has a 2013-worthy mobile chip inside.