Is it curtains for the Ouya?

To say that the Ouya was disappointing is a bit of an understatement. When it stormed onto the scene a couple years ago, it made a lot of promises. Ouya was going to change gaming by giving us the world’s first open console. People were excited, very excited. It became one of the fastest funded Kickstarter campaigns. Then it launched.

The final product was released in an unfinished state. It was buggy, the controllers sucked, and content was pretty thin. Sure, it could play any Android app, just not well. Most of which weren’t available in the proprietary app store anyway. If you wanted Netflix on it, you had to go through a complicated “sideloading” process. Its hardware, based around nVidia’s Tegra 3, was already outdated by that point. That chip was never known for its gaming prowess. I suppose you can’t complain much, given the $100 price point, but it still underwhelmed.

With the honeymoon period long over, the people behind Ouya are now offering a limited run All Access Pass to the system. For a monthly fee, you could play most of the console’s paid app library. Surprisingly, it sold out very quickly. Though this has left gaming pundits wondering whether this is the Ouya’s last stand. A desperate ploy to maintain relevance is a rapidly moving industry.

Back in the day, Nintendo went by the mantra “the name of the game is the game.” Meaning that good software sells hardware and not the other way around. When you build a console, any console, it has to have quality games. It seems like that would have been easy for the Ouya. Though as we saw with the Vita, systems can’t survive without a network of top notch exclusives and a constant stream of fresh content. Nobody wants to play phone games on their TV.

Could the Ouya bounce back? We don’t like to be too pessimistic here. If they improved the system software, beefed up the hardware, started rolling out better non-gaming apps, and marketed itself as a streaming box, then maybe. However, Amazon now has its Kindle Fire, and Apple is rumoured to be launching an app store enabled Apple TV. Both of which offer something similar from strong, recognizable brands. Things do not look good for the little open console.