console wars

5 Reasons why OUYA will never outbreak sony or microsoft PlayStation 4 or X-Box 720

1. While more than 30,000 people have given it a vote of confidence and have demonstrated that by pledging millions of dollars, the console technically doesn't exist yet, and no games have been confirmed for it. It may look like Minecraft is confirmed, but it's only kinda-sorta, as demonstrated by the mostly noncommittal quote on the Ouya Kickstarter page: "If Ouya delivers on the promise of being the first true open gaming platform that gives indie developers access to the living room gaming market, yes that is a great idea. We will follow the development of Ouya and see how it resonates with gamers. I could see all current Mojang games go on the platform if there's a demand for it," said someone at Mojang that's not Notch.

2. As with any new marketplace, content discovery is potentially an issue. The early glimpses given of the Ouya user interface show a Windows 8/Xbox Live "Metro"-style arrangement, which presumably will be subject to some kind of curation on Ouya's end. Much like the Kindle Fire, or some of the cheap (and nastier) Android tablets, Ouya's storefront is completely separate from the larger Google-maintained Play Store, so though this is an "Android console," that doesn't mean you'll automatically have access to the thousands of Android games currently available. No Angry Birds for you! Unless Rovio chooses to produce a specific version.

3. The last thing the Android scene needs right now is even more fragmentation. While there's plenty of incentive for studios working on an Ouya game to also want to think about porting to phones and tablets (scale, being the most obvious), there's currently little incentive for them to port the other way. Despite the success of the Kickstarter campaign, the launch day installed base is only going to be around 84,000 units. Given that the model for everything is free-to-play, and on average only around 5 to 10 percent of players (at best) cough up any cash for these things, that means launch games are relying on 4,000 to 8,000 paying "whales" to make some money.

4. The flip side of the hackable coin is that hackable = pirateable.

5. People love their tablets; why would you buy an Ouya if you already have a tablet with an HDMI out on it? The Nexus 7 is a comparably powered device, does everything you'd need, plus it's a proper Android tablet--so it's portable, flexible, and runs everything that's in the Google Play Store.