The Ouya console will run on relatively low-powered hardware and sell for $99. This makes some people unhappy.
If you have even a passing interest in video games, you’ve probably heard about Ouya, a low-cost, Android-based video game console that’s in the midst of a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. They’d hoped to raise $950,000 by Aug. 9 to fund production of the thing. Two days into the campaign, they’re at $3 million and counting.
And so begins the backlash.
While I haven’t exactly been wishing someone would produce an inexpensive, low-powered new game console – that’s what the Wii is for! – I very much like the idea of what the Ouya folks are doing. They’re building a $99 device that will allow us to play small games on a big screen with a proper controller, while giving the independent developers who are driving nearly all the innovation in this business another means of expanding their audience.
Not everyone is as receptive to Ouya, though. Two of my Toronto-based games-scribbling peers, dudes with whom I am often in agreement, seem a bit put out by the idea. The always interesting Pete Nowak feels the Ouya represents a backwards step in console tech [UPDATE: Pete responds that he is down on the current console generation, not Ouya itself -- my apologies for the misrepresentation] while Justin Amirkhani (whose Gamer Unplugged project I wrote about recently) calls new tech like the Ouya, Xbox SmartGlass and even streaming music services “snake oil” for the 21st century. Both of these gents complain about the overcomplication of console gaming, the argument being that consoles are taking on some of the disadvantages of PC gaming with few of the benefits.
To which I say… seriously, guys?
You wanna know what a first world problem is? Complaining that it takes minute longer to begin playing your video game because there are new technologies in place that didn’t exist in 1995. Have we become so spoiled by instant-on everything that this is really an argument? Would we rather go back to the days when games couldn’t be saved in mid-progress, when you couldn’t play against your friends unless they were in the same room, when a game bug was permanent and couldn’t be fixed? While we’re at it, should we yell at those damn kids to get off our lawn?
"Back in my day, all you had to do to get ready to play a game was blow on the cartridge!"
I don’t appreciate companies like EA and Ubisoft ramming their mandatory online accounts down my throat, or developers rushing games to retail simply because they know glitches can later be patched, or any number of money-grubbing tactics currently sullying the business. But if you feel that a few minor inconveniences are not a worthy tradeoff for the degree of gaming depth and sophistication we enjoy today, you need to pull your head out of your arse. There are tons of problems in the video games industry, but very few of them are to be blamed on the technologies driving the games themselves.
The argument that the increasing number of steps required to play console games could be something that alienates a broader audience is valid, but is that broader audience interested in console games in the first place? It’s more likely that they’re playing Facebook and iOS and Android games, exactly the sort of titles Ouya is suited for. In fact, this could be the game console you buy for your parents, not yourself.
But it’s not just about soccer moms playing Bejeweled. Ouya is being touted as means for small developers to connect more easily with an audience, using a dirt-cheap console that is rootable, hackable and modifiable by the user. How is giving indie devs another means of selling their games a bad thing? How is not having to wait for Apple or Microsoft to approve your game for digital distribution a bad thing? How is letting the consumer do whatever he wants with the device he bought a bad thing? No one’s going to force anyone to buy Ouya, and maybe it will fail spectacularly. But their hearts are in the right place, and I’m really interested to see what they’ll do with it. Judging from the Kickstarter campaign, a lot of other folks are, too.
It’s all a bit academic anyway. In 10 years, gaming consoles as we know them today will no longer exist, owning physical media (or even owning individual digital copies of media) will seem laughably quaint, and everything will be cloud-based and instant and available on low-cost, low-powered hardware. If my curmudgeonly friends can just tough it out until then, these nightmares of forced installs and updates and multiple log-ins may finally be over.
Stay strong, brothers. Stay strong.