OUYA, a $99 Console That’s Making Waves

oyua

Personally, I’m loathe the give attention to Kickstarter campaigns, which is why, aside from the Double Fine and Banner Saga posts, you haven’t seen any mention of that website on here. The gaming journalism industry at large has latched on to Kickstarter as an easy source of news, so I quickly became jaded towards it.

That said, I can’t seem to ignore OUYA, a new open-source console that’s powered by Android that is currently sitting at $3,686,126 of its $950,000 goal. Suffice to say, people are excited about OUYA, and the developers themselves give a pretty nice description on the Kickstarter page. Games on the OUYA have to be free to play to start out, but it mentions that games are free to adopt the microtransaction model made popular by Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends. The OUYA also comes with an app to stream stuff from Twitch.TV right out of the box.

What exactly is inside the OUYA, though? Here are the specs:

  • Tegra3 quad-core processor
  • 1GB RAM
  • 8GB of internal flash storage
  • HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
  • WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
  • Bluetooth LE 4.0
  • USB 2.0 (one)
  • Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
  • Android 4.0

The OUYA is totally open to hacking and the page even encourages it. All this for $99 dollars, folks.

Personally I don’t see what they big deal is about this whole thing, but it’s been blowing up pretty big so I thought you guys would like the opportunity to talk about it. So, the OUYA. Do you think it will actually deliver?

Update: Ben Kuchera over at The Penny-Arcade Report has a great article up about the OUYA and the many red flags that it raises. All of this stuff seems fairly obvious to me as things you would look for when buying a console (example: does it actually exist?), but people seem so hyped about the posibilites that this is getting passed over.

Source – OUYA Kickstarter