
$99 hackable console largest ever crowd funded gaming project
The Ouya development team has raised four million dollars on Kickstarter, shattering the record for the most funds raised for a gaming project on a crowdfunding site.
The Ouya is an Android based console about the size of a rubix cube, and seeks to attract developers back to the console market by promising an open development environment at a low price point.
"The console market is pushing developers away," reads the project page.
"We’ve seen a brain drain: some of the best, most creative gamemakers are focused on mobile and social games because those platforms are more developer-friendly."
The console isn't just competing with the growing mobile trend by targeting developers; priced at $99 dollars, the Ouya costs less than most smartphones.
This $99 fee covers the developer kit as well, which comes with the console.
The developers do place one restriction, that the game must include one free element, whether it be a free trial, or a free-to-play business model.
The popularity of this idea was immediately apparent. In eight hours the Ouya had raised over a million dollars- the fastest a project has ever reached seven figures.
The project currently stands at $4.2 million.
Only the Double Fine Kickstarter adventure game project that started the crowdfunding craze comes close to this record, having raised a million dollars in under 24 hours, to close a month later at $3.3 million.
Though the all-time highest funded Kickstarter project is still the Pebble, an e-paper watch which raised over ten million dollars, the Ouya is far and away the largest amount of money raised in the shortest amount of time for a gaming project, and with 27 days remaining, stands a fine chance of breaking the Pebble's record.
To me this sounds like an awesome idea. There is absolutely no reason not to open up the market and remove artificial barriers to entry such as developer approval, dev kit cost, release schedule management, title royalties, custom duplication schedules and so on.
It will be challenging to do though, especially the back end services aspect. If you look at Xbox Live or PSN, there is a significant amount of infrastructure associated with offering titles for download, and that is a harder problem than a raspberry pi redo with bigger CPU and GPU.
This is your cue, Valve or Unity...