Industry Lamentations Ouya

Ouya, if you'll remember (or just look it up), was successfully Kickstarted last August. I myself decided to put in for a console and four controllers; certainly this little box was never going to overthrow everyone's favorite multinational console manufacturers and publishers, but it - conceptually - proved the point that a small-ish organization could use commodity hardware to craft an affordable, easy-to-target platform.

And I still think that's true! But Ouya, through the somewhat common faults of overpromising results and underestimating unknowns, has made a somewhat messy bed for itself to lie in. The system software is still very immature. The early-dev games available are somewhat less than whelming. The controllers are poorly designed -- yeah, I sure am glad I pledged for four of them, now. (There'd better be a free or cheap replacement program, and they'd better continue to be compatible with "every year"'s refreshed hardware.)

And all this before the Ouya is even officially released. Which is, allegedly, in about three weeks (after a delay).

Under different circumstances, I wouldn't be at all disappointed in just getting my shipment of a product that was still under basic hardware design only ten months ago. But, having only today received my distribution notification (as in, a notification that I will receive a shipping notification later), over a week after being told that the last order had left their warehouse - which was, itself, months after being drip-fed updates about everyone else's orders shipping, including the surprising news that the special Limited Edition versions hadn't even started manufacturing until well after the ordinary retail boxes - I'm, yeah, a little sore about it.

So, at least in this way, Ouya's bungle is less about execution and more about PR. If they had simply said that backers would get their shipments before and up to the retail release, I wouldn't be nearly as distressed. Instead of putting out the same shipping graph every week, Ouya PR should have been filling their Kickstarter updates with software news, playing up in-development games and new dev partners. The fact that they haven't only makes me more apprehensive about the future of software support for Ouya.

The one flaw that Ouya was always going to have - and will never be able to escape, even with yearly iterations - is less-than-cutting-edge hardware specs. So it doesn't make sense for them to neglect the only strategy for overcoming this, which is to encourage rapid, and prompt, software development -- before in-production projects get too attached to newer, more powerful competitors.

Ouya still has an opportunity to undo its bad pre-release image, with a rich system update and multiple attractive games at launch. But until and unless that happens, they've only themselves to blame for the poison in the well.