Kevin Dent is a very interesting person to follow on twitter (TheKevinDent) mainly because he works in the video game industry on the capital side and is very opinionated and open on his twitter account, which leads us to the following article after he posted 10 reasons why OUYA will fail.
A quick recap for those that don’t know what OUYA is, it’s a Android based console that is currently being kickstarted and will bring about the first open console platform. Meaning that anyone can develop for it. It’ll be cheap and licence free.
So easy enough right? Sounds great and who wouldn’t want cheaper games?
Well Kevin Dent for one, well to be more precise Kevin doesn’t think the idea is viable and this is why
1. The cost price of the Tegra 3 chip set is $25 if they got it at cost and the rest of the mats and manufacturing for free= 160K units
2. Lack of developer buy in: there are no developers that JUST focus on Android because it does not monetize well.
3. Open: they make rooting super easy which means piracy will be super easy.
4. Lack of experience in the VG space
5. Content drives device sales. Today they have zero content, costs to port an existing title? 100k+
6. Who wants to buy a device with 8GB of space, 1GB of ram and a low end chipset?
7. I literally don’t know a single person that wants to play a mobile game on a 60? screen
8. Also capital related: as soon as they get the kickstarter money they have to pay the IRS as kickstarter money is booked as income
9. They have zero distribution into retail, do you think Amazon will be promoting this?
10. 3DO
So I don’t agree with all of his points but the three I highlighted are killers in my opinion. The OUYA is going to very quickly become the console of choice for pirates and all the top developers and publishers are going to shun it for just that reason.
It costs millions to make new games and to then put it on a system that can be pirated within seconds, legally, just doesn’t make sense.
It’s great that the community is getting behind OUYA in a big way with over $4 million now pledged but the reality is that all that money has come from 33742 backers, which if they all picked up one game would make it a massive failure in comparison to a Xbox 360 or PS3 title. This idea is a hipsters dream but the reality is a lot less pleasant
Last Updated: July 13, 2012
imalwaysright
July 19, 2013 at 18:21
I own a OUYA now, and just want to say that your are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, oh so wrong.