By Nelson Schneider - 03/30/14 at 01:19 PM CT
While at one point everything seemed to be coming up roses for the OUYA company and its Indie console, all that fell apart once the hardware actually hit store shelves. After my unfavorable impressions of the OUYA hardware and the proprietary OUYA shop’s library of games, I hadn’t touched the thing for months.
Yet OUYA managed to drag me back to the Indie console just yesterday, as I received the following email from them Friday afternoon:
Being the thrifty soul that I am, how was I to turn down free money? If OUYA wants to resort to bribery to coax users into dusting off the Little Gray Box that Couldn’t, so be it. So after waiting two hours for the OUYA to download a system update, I input my promo code and snagged my $5.
I’ll bet you’re wondering what I spent it on, aren’t you? Get ready for a surprise… NOTHING!
In all the months my OUYA sat untouched, all of my ‘favorite’ games either went multi-platform, received zero updates, or became available in the vanilla Google Play store. Leaving the Indie console to rot seemed like an even better idea after OUYA announced that they are going to start focusing on an “OUYA Everywhere” initiative to allow OUYA shop access from a variety of non-OUYA Android-powered platforms.
OUYA seems to have the entire concept of an Indie console bass-ackwards: OUYA wasn’t an amazing idea because it would create a further fragmentation of the walled garden that is mobile app development and distribution – It was an amazing idea because it provided cheap hardware for playing Android games on a big screen. The OUYA should have served as a conduit for handheld haters and landline luddites like me into the world of apps that was blossoming on expensive, contract-shackled, tiny touchscreens. Focusing on the OUYA shop instead of the OUYA hardware just seems like a ludicrously bad decision on behalf of the OUYA leadership. The lack of big-name Android exclusives and the overwhelming amount of uncurated trash games flooding the OUYA shop are the two killing flaws of the entire system, NOT the fact that people can’t access the OUYA shop on their phone or tablet!
The entire OUYA experience has left me extremely jaded toward Android-powered consoles. I want to hold out hope that the Mad Catz MOJO will fill the big-screen-Android niche where OUYA failed, but it’s very difficult for me to support a second such attempt at launch. Sure, MOJO brings full Google Play access and will handle the transition of OUYA digital purchases to a new platform in a manner presumably much more elegant than Nintendo’s Wii to WiiU transfer… But the once unbridled excitement about OUYA has been transformed into balking hesitation, which shows just how much damage the OUYA has caused to an entire emerging segment of the videogame industry.
