$8,580,682 (from 63,277 backers) - keep perspective guys. 60k - That's like one week of sales of one of the consoles in Japan only. And those aren't even pushed units numbers. Not to mention amount of money that rolls in the likes of EA titles. It's all nice and all, but nowhere near disruptive word.
Woah, let them actually make the thing and bring it to market before you write them off. It's grossly unfair to compare their fundraising efforts to the total sales of established console games... At this point, anyway.
I'm not writing them off - in fact I'm cheering up their effort. With this I was trying to say what it looks like in larger perspective. OUYA has a really, REALLY big hurdle in front of themselves in order for us to call them disruptive. OUYA being a success or not (more likely), one thing is for sure - I'm starting to like all these multi million projects on kickstarter. Big budgets and not from an investment company.
Why is it unfair? They (despite claims that, honestly, just don't make a lot of sense) want to be treated seriously. This is treating them seriously. Their platform, which by the way is not a "quick port" from Android if you care about user experience, has a tiny user base compared either to consoles or phones.
I'd like to see them do well, but I'm personally not going to treat it as something special until they show that it is. So far it sounds like a shovel-ware conduit to the TV and that gets people nothing.
That it hasn't yet released doesn't mean we don't know what we're looking at in terms of a market. 60,000 committed users is a spectacularly tiny user base.
I'd bet money (and am in fact betting my own time, which isn't entirely dissimilar) that the userbase of modern Android devices--say, from as far back as the Nexus One phone to the current Nexus 7 tablet--is so much bigger that if even one in twenty users care about games it's a more viable market.
60,000 pre-orders for a completely unknown company months before launch is not small. Usually they sell more once the thing is actually in stores, and they already have the best kind of marketing they can get, hype and people putting dollars into it before a physical product exists.
Yes, the big console makers sell that many every week, but they are not a big console maker, so they don't need lots of numbers to sustain themselves, that's what growth is for, and they are showing better indications of it then Nintendo or Sony when they first got on the market, assuming they actually deliver the product they will see more. and their price point puts them in closer competition to a PS2 or Roku.
For them, the hardware order isn't small, no. However, they're pricing it so low that they're almost certainly making very little money per-unit, so they're hoping to make money on their app store.
To make money on their app store, they need games.
Not many developers are going to write games for a platform with around 1/16th of the user base of your average front-line Android phone. (Please don't say "it's an easy port"; it's not and the Ouya people's claim that it is is fucking dishonest.)
A few companies have committed to bringing their products to the Ouya. I am interested in seeing how many of them follow through. Of those who follow through, I am interested in how many just push shovelware because doing a real port to a platform with 60,000 guaranteed users, many of which are probably going to be hacking the shit out of the thing (and making software security a non-starter), is not economically viable for most people.
I'm sure the argument goes that ouya users are "proper gamers" - which is great but it's only really worthwhile if you also can charge "proper game" fees of $10+
The scale isn't there for a freemium or $0.99 app economy.
You don't need to own the market to disrupt the market. Even if they don't sell a single unit beyond the preorders, selling 60k units of a gaming device is enough to make studios take notice that there is a demand. Compare it with minor political parties, where the goal often isn't to become president but rather to force the hands of larger, established parties.
Yeah, even if it influences the Xbox Arcade (and Sony, Nintendo competitors) then it could have an impact on the market simliar to the Steam effect.
Every July and December gamers on Steam go crazy over sales - twice yearly excitement in general that the big three consoles only get at launch and with major title releases every few years.
