OUYA - Android console

Good news, everyone! Ouya won't have online multiplayer at launch, any major streaming services and most of the developers signed up have never shipped a game!

 

I'll personally be quite surprised if the company making Ouya and the Ouya itself is still around in 2 years, unless it transforms into something else. As a game console, it's pretty much going to fail, IMO.

Regards,
SB

 

OUYA's operational costs aren't going to be that high. They're not really like the real console manufacturers in that regard. This may or may not mean they're doing a half-assed job to get by, but so long as they're just developing little PCBs with entirely off the shelf parts they don't really need a lot of volume to survive (and they can make due with less than stellar software). This is all the more true so long as nVidia is essentially sponsoring them - in fact, the lower volume they stay the more likely nVidia is going to feel that they can afford this; selling a low volume to push the product and brand (TegraZone) is worth some investment, but selling SoCs near cost for millions of units is suddenly much less attractive.

They're pretty much in the same league as a variety of third party eval boards for ARM SoCs. Those have stuck with various SoC manufacturers for years. Check out HardKernel's offerings, to use just one example. Their volumes have been close to nothing but they've still managed to sell for years without risk of bankruptcy.

Depending on your criteria, I could see them both failing as a game console and continuing to provide updates to their user base well past the 2 year mark. They could go totally bust in terms of exclusive content and still make their customers happy. We're talking around 50,000 to 100,000 people - not a completely miniscule installment but nothing that makes it comparable to real consoles. And I don't think anyone was really betting on much more.

 

Good news everyone!

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...edia-and-gaming-prospects-for-android-console

 

Where are you getting your quote that Nvidia is selling the older T3 to Ouya at cost of making the silicon? That makes no sense at all.

The T3 is a mature chip so any sales now above silicon cost is pure profit.

 

I said near cost. And if you think that selling SoCs near cost for a low volume part makes no sense then you must have no familiar with eval boards because that's common practice - and sometimes eval boards take more sophisticated forms than unenclosed PCBs, instead showing up in practical devices. It wouldn't be odd at all for nVidia to regard OUYA similarly, and they've pretty much said outright that they're sponsoring it. In other words, it's a vehicle to promote their chip and development for their platform (but I think I already said that). So no, I don't know if this is the case for sure (and didn't say I had a quote, don't put words in my mouth), but it's not an unlikely scenario at all.

And while selling millions of these near cost would still make them a profit they'd probably prefer to sell them at higher margins for phones or tablets. This is true regardless of what deal they're giving OUYA, so long as it still qualifies as a "deal."

 

FF III (And 1, 2, Dimension and Crystal Chronicles) is already on Android. These articles really aren't painting a strong picture of solid developer support.

 

FF3 deal is also nothing new, although I'm not sure what SE is changing for the port. If anything at all.

With all of the solutions now available for gaming controls on Android (conventional gamepads over BT or USB, grip on gamepads, devices with builtin controls) you'd have to be crazy to make a game exclusively for OUYA. But tacking on equivalent screen controls for everyone w/o a dedicated controller is going to be a pain.. It'd be nice if you could just make dedicated controls an installation requirement but that'd cause outrage.

 

So, for AAA games, it's going to feature a game that has already been on Android for quite a while now? I'm pretty sure that didn't take much to convince them to allow it to be sold to Ouya users, considering it's basically an Android box. Wake me up when there's a modern AAA game being developed for it. And not just smartphone apps.

Regards,
SB

 

We'll have to see how well the Ouya does, but I think people would rather see what well done indie games on the PS4 can do rather than the Ouya, especially if those games can still tap into the social infrastructure of the PS4.

 

If you like to know OUYA games list is easy

http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?18-List-of-Games-Coming-to-the-OUYA

 

Tegra 3 on steroids

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...re-refresh-rate-will-be-more-like-smartphones

 

It seems like you are just making up a price to fit your belief.

As for nVidia sponsoring the OUYA, if they were then why did OUYA have to go to Kickstarter for funding?

 

Well at least on the Xbox the opinion is not great for indie developers:

Is it the same type of "hide behind the curtains" or different on the PS?

 

I'm making a reasoned determination based on the following:

1) HDMI sticks with Chinese ARM SoCs sell for ~$70 with razor thin margins
2) OUYA, as announced, has significantly better specs; I compared it with contemporary HDMI sticks at the time and it had twice the RAM, twice the storage, and better wireless capabilities
3) OUYA has a more robust and expensive shell, and AFAIK comes with an AC adapter which you usually don't find with HDMI sticks powered off of USB
4) OUYA comes with a wireless controller that includes a touchpad, I'll leave it as an exercise to try to price this but equivalents are not dramatically cheap
5) It costs nVidia a lot more to make an SoC than a company like Allwinner, Mediatek, or Rockchip, by virtue of being a big western company with a lot more overhead and using a lot of custom IP and using TSMC instead of a cheap Chinese fab, so they can't compete on price with similar margins

Therefore it would seem that a $99 price is aggressive and would be difficult to achieve if they're buying Tegra 3s at thick margins. And given that nVidia has outright mentioned their support of them it's pretty realistic that they're giving them a good deal (ie, better than what they normally charge) on the components they supply.

I'll wait for your counter argument before deciding that you are in fact the one making things up arbitrarily.

Sponsoring doesn't mean "fully funding." They could be offering a very attractive and special price for the SoC, some reference design material, even offer to review the design. That would qualify as sponsoring. It wouldn't remove the necessity to fund the project.

 

I don't understand this. Apart from buying into the romance of it, what significant advantage does OUYA offer compared with PC?

(1) It supposedly will have different hardware in a year or so, meaning it's not really a fixed hardware platform like traditional console which has an established role in the market. Its upgrade cycle sounds similar to PC or smartphone.
(2) For a non-mobile gaming machine, it's computing power is rather weak.
(3) Its install base will, in all likelihood, be very small. Not just small in comparison to the total of all PCs currently in use, but small in comparison to something like the number of laptops sold in a month, or the number of Kepler display cards already out there. So, you can tailor your product to a very small corner of the PC market and still have a bigger audience than on OUYA.
(4) For people who know about OUYA, how many prefer games on TV? Of those, how many of them find it difficult to connect a more powerful PC or laptop etc they already own to a TV? Is there a big practical hurdle to bridge between PC and TV that warrant a new piece of USD100 hardware?
(5) What content this platform can provide above and beyond the quality and quantity available on PC today, both free and paid?

A well organized store may help sell things, but that in itself doesn't validate spending resources on this piece of hardware. You could work on some kind of indie store software on PC and probably do a better job helping indies sell games because the entrance barrier for consumers to use this indie store should be much less than USD100.

 

I get the feeling it's mainly supported by people who "dislike" Microsoft strongly. Or who have been proponents of Linux. Or who really like Android. I'm sure there's others interested, but most of the people I've run into that have talked about it fit into one of those 3 categories.

Regards,
SB

 

If things like Nvidia KAYLA, are the future iterations of OUYA; and can keep games compatible, it could be very interesting.

 

May be hard for nVidia to get in because fundamentally, gaming is not a platform or technology problem. It's content and creativity (entertainment). Internet and social and mobile may be the in thing now, but what we get to consume are the games.

There seem to be delicate business model issues between various parties. At this point, having a specialized Android h/w that introduces its own issues may not help.

 

Kayla isn't really anything new, nVidia has been making boards that pair Tegra with some GPU chip for a while now, for instance:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/seco-dev-kit.html

I think the idea is that in the future nVidia will be releasing compute platforms that have integrated Denver CPUs and are supposed to run autonomously w/o needing an x86 system. And they want to prepare people for this by sending out dev kits that let them develop with a similar environment. Problem is that it isn't that similar of an environment at all if the memory isn't unified.

Something like Kayla is probably a bad fit for future OUYA. Marrying a separate Tegra SoC and GPU chip also requires two sets of memory, where the GPU's will probably not be available in stacked (PoP) form. This adds a lot to cost and board space which are both highly constrained on OUYA. The thermal requirements also may be too high for the little box that can't fit much of a fan.