OUYA

» see ouya.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2012 i was twenty-eight, working in ankara on engineering problems that paid in lira. ouya was a 950-thousand-dollar kickstarter goal that hit 8.6 million in a month, fronted by a confident pitch about breaking the console duopoly. that whole sentence was a thing happening to a different demographic in a different currency. i watched the news coverage from the same distance everyone outside the bay area watched it.

julie uhrman and a small team launched the campaign on july 10, 2012. the device was a 75mm cube running android 4.1 jelly bean on an nvidia tegra 3, with a custom controller and a 99-dollar price. the pitch was that android phones already had cheap, downloadable games, and that the same model on a tv could finally undercut the big console makers at the bottom of the market.

the campaign closed at 8,596,475 dollars across 63,416 backers, the eighth-highest kickstarter total at the time. the retail device shipped to backers in june 2013 with thirty-some launch games. the press reception was lukewarm, and the launch lineup was missing the killer app the press had been promised.

~ the record ~

~ the kickstarter moment ~

july 2012 was peak kickstarter. pebble had hit ten million dollars in may. ouya took 8.6 in a few weeks. for one summer it looked like crowdfunding had genuinely broken the venture-funding monopoly on consumer hardware. ouya is what happened when that moment passed.

the basic problem was that breaking a console oligopoly takes more than 8 million dollars, especially when the budget has to cover hardware and a developer ecosystem all at once. by the end of 2013 ouya was pivoting hard, eventually licensing the storefront onto razer's forge tv before selling itself outright in a 2015 acqui-hire that razer announced in late july.

~ the fall ~

the games were the first crack. ouya had originally promised that every game on the platform would be free-to-try and that the developer split would tilt heavier than steam's, but the catalog stayed thin and the standout title peaked at seven thousand copies sold. that title was towerfall, which then went on to make matt thorson real money on every other platform after he ported it off ouya. the pattern repeated.

the hardware was the second crack. the controller had famous bluetooth latency issues at launch, and the firmware had to be patched twice in the first month. razer's later kit-bashed forge tv version dropped almost everything ouya-shaped about the original device.

~ the long tail ~

razer turned the storefront off on june 25, 2019, exactly six years to the day after retail launch. by then most of the original team had moved on. the cube itself is still a recognizable shape on a shelf, and there is an active homebrew scene keeping a server alive for the people who still want to plug their backer-edition unit into a tv. the rest of the kickstarter promise has, like most kickstarter promises, become a memory of one specific summer when crowdfunding looked like it could change consumer hardware.

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