The future of console gaming is going to be simple. After all, you just pronounce it "OOO-Yeah."
The OUYA will be a cheap, affordable console powered by Android and will cost a little over a hundred dollars while providing you with free-to-play games. It sounds like the future is too good to be true, right? It's up in the air for now since the OUYA hasn't even been mass produced yet. The system launched its Kickstarter today and they're running with the mantra, "deep down, you know your best gaming memories happened in your living room."
Which isn't wrong, especially in our continuing age of tablet and ultra-portable gaming that's abandoned buttons for touch screens and motion sensing. But it goes beyond that with a design from fuseproject, who designed the Jawbone Jambox and $100-per-child-laptop. Polygon took an in-depth look at the premise of making a console that can double as an SDK for developers and how the OUYA folks view their creation as groundbreaking. After all, it takes a lot of balls to internally refer to your controller as the "Stradivarius controller."
Going back to the "free-to-play" concept, Ouya's mentality follows the popular online formula that everything's free to try out, but going past level caps, adding weapons and unlocking the full game cost money. It's becoming a really popular theory that the free model will entice online gamers and seems prime for the console market, especially as online multiplayer is sneaking into concepts like Max Payne 3, which otherwise focus on the single-player experience.
The Ouya should be the right step in a new console direction in the awkward, upcoming battle of second screen viewing and app-based performance. Like Greenlight, opening up potential console release could cause a revolution when it comes to what "indie games" represent to the big time AAA games' implosion.
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