Ouya Wants to 'Disrupt' the Console Industry | Games and Me

After years in the gaming industry, Julie Uhrman started to notice a significant shift ? excitement for console and PC gaming started to fade, while mobile platforms got all the attention.

Uhrman, whose resume includes executive roles with video game companies like GameFly, IGN, and Vivendi Universal, set out on a mission to bring gaming back to the living room. Her idea was to develop a $99, Android-powered video game console that offers free-to-play titles for gamers, and is accessible to developers.

?I started reaching out to game industry professionals and developers and asked them if we could build a game console on Android for the television,? Uhrman said in a recent interview with PCMag. ?Resoundingly, I got ?that?s a great idea, I can?t believe that hasn?t been done before,? and the idea of an open game console that leveraged Android, a very popular and well-used operating system, came into vision.?

Keeping with the theme of openness, Uhrman and her team took to the crowd-sourced fundraising platform Kickstarter last month to solicit the financing they needed to produce the console ? dubbed Ouya (right). You probably know the story by now, but if not, then here?s the gist: the company initially sought to raise $950,000 on Kickstarter but ended up with $8.6 million in donations.

When she talks about Ouya (rhymes with booya), Uhrman?s passion and enthusiasm is infectious.

?Ouya is really an audacious plan to disrupt the console industry,? she said. ?

Uhrman isn?t alone in her excitement. The company?s list of advisors reads like a who?s-who of gaming industry luminaries. Plus, pre-orders are blowing away expectations, and thousands of developers have expressed interest in making games for the platform.

With promises to deliver its first batch of consoles by next March, some have questioned the company?s ability to actually deliver. But if Uhrman has any concerns about meeting the deadline, she isn?t making them known.

?I am absolutely confident that we can deliver on our promise to build a great product with great content for March of 2013,? Uhrman said.

PCMag sat down with Uhrman recently to find out about the purpose behind bringing a product like this to market, where the team is at with the effort, and more.

PCMag: How long has Ouya been in development and what has gone into the process of designing and building it so far?
Uhrman: We have been working on this since the end of last year. Ouya is really an audacious plan to disrupt the console industry and it is three parts: hardware, software, and a game ecosystem.

We needed to first vet the assumption that we could build a powerful, beautifully designed game console for the television for $99. We partnered with a lot of individuals who had built hardware before ? advisors and friends. We brought on Yves B?har (left), who built the Jambox and has beautiful designs and understands how to build for an audience.

We are not building a rocket ship here ? all of our components are commodity components. We are taking something that is very common and combining it in a new way. So we first validated that it was possible to bring it to the audience for $99.

Then we had to determine what the right business model was. We believe in openness and accessibility, and we chose Android as the underlying operating system. As it relates to a business model, we embraced something that core gamers have embraced both on a PC and a mobile platform, which is the idea of free-to-play games.? For us that really means free to try.

Every game on Ouya has some element that is free for the user, and then it?s up to developers to determine how they want to monetize the content. They can choose in-app purchases, subscriptions, or a fully paid version after the free demo.

Games can run from $0.99 to $59.99 but, fundamentally, every gamer gets the opportunity to try something for free, and that is basically the core value proposition of Ouya. It?s an open, accessible, affordable game console for the TV built on Android, where its $99 and all the games are free to try.

It?s also accessible for developers in that for $99 you get a game console and an SDK. Our game console is also a debug kit, and there are no yearly licensing fees or expensive SDKs. You get a game console and all the tools you need to build great games for less than the price of two console games. We embrace an app submission model similar to mobile, so anybody who ever wanted to build a game for the TV can do so.

PCMag: How did you come up with the name Ouya?
Uhrman: We worked with Yves B?har and the fuseproject on that. Openness is very important to us as it relates to developers and gamers and the way we even brought the product to market ? leveraging Kickstarter. The O in Ouya stands for openness.

PCMag: When did you first realize that this idea resonated with people?
Uhrman: Early on we took the idea to developers and received overwhelmingly positive response. Brian Fargo became an investor and advisor. Adam Saltsman, Adam Nash from Mojang, Jordan Mechner ? all of these industry luminaries, including Ed Fries of the original Xbox team, who became an advisor ? believed in this idea of openness and accessibility and allowing anyone who wants to develop a game for the television to do so.

Then when we took this idea to Kickstarter, we were overwhelmed by the level of support from gamers. In a matter of 29 days we had over 63,000 backers ? people who believed in Ouya and want Ouya in their living room and are telling us so by opening up their pocket books and pre-ordering our device, which won?t be available until March of 2013.

Kickstarter really gave us the ability to open up a two-way dialogue with gamers and developers and find out if this is something that they want, and the response was overwhelming. This is absolutely something that people want. I have thousands of emails from developers wanting to develop for the platform.

I think that this is something that is incredibly timely in that, there was nothing new announced at E3, and there was a lot of talk about whether consoles are dead. We don?t believe consoles are dead, we just believe that we need to re-think the business model and I think we?ve proved in a very short amount of time that gamers and developers want this.

PCMag: How has the scope of the project changed from when you thought you?would be (maybe)?working with $950,000 to now, when you?re working with almost $9 million?

Uhrman: A majority of the money that we raised is going directly back into building consoles for backers who have pre-ordered the device, building tools for game developers, and to help fund game development when it makes sense.

$950,000 ? that was the amount of money we needed to bring Ouya to market with a certain number of units. As there was more interest through Kickstarter, we went back, talked with our partners, vetted the numbers, and basically increased the number of units that we could ship on day one.

The money that we raised on Kickstarter will allow us to deliver all those units in March and effectively provide features and functionality sooner to developers then we had originally planned.

Continue Reading: Can Ouya really deliver?

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408932,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121

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