Admittedly, I don't follow the open source scene very much. I don't care to hack things, I've never rooted a smartphone, jailbroke a console, or done much with homebrew. The closest I got was buying an R4 card for my DS, which allowed some limited media playback and software ROMs to be played. Frankly the homebrew games that I tried on that were forgettable at best, and in general my experience has been that homebrew games are crap, akin to the shovelware on the Android marketplace.
Don't get me wrong, the world of open source has produced some very cool things, and has been very important in the development of computing. In fact, it's unavoidable. These days, the most useful things coming from the open source community are utilitarian in nature, from running simple file servers to streaming media. Open hardware platforms are a slightly different beast, but still very cool in concept, and sometimes even in practice.
Unfortunately open source hardware is often relegated to tinker toys for the tech savvy. They're not free, for obvious reasons, and so they're rarely the sort of thing you'd be willing to try out on a whim. If a piece of open source software doesn't work out for you, you can just delete it, but with hardware, you're stuck with a physical object taking up space, and a chunk out of your bank account. The appeal of such a thing is very niche by its nature.
Some open source hardware is obviously more niche than others. Arduino boards, for example, require both electrical and programming knowledge to get anything useful out of them. Media player boxes, like Boxee (though it's hard to call it open source at this point), are much more targeted to a specific purpose, and are virtually plug-and-play.
Open source gaming platforms are slightly more complicated. Granted there's some overlap between media boxes and gaming platforms in functionality, but gaming platforms are far more risky. If the homebrew community falls apart around a particular gaming device, suddenly it's next to useless. There's been many such devices to debut, and most of them have fallen flat after a short time. So when I heard about yet another open gaming platform called Ouya, it was hard not to shrug it off.
Until the Kickstarter campaign got underway, that is. In 24 hours it had more than doubled its goal of $950k. In two days, it got nearly 4 million dollars. In the remaining 28 days, it's bound to get a shit-load more. I can't speak with any actual data to support me, but it's hard to imagine another open gaming platform with quite so much capital backing it up.
Then you look a little closer. It's got industry vets working on it. It's got the OLPC dude designing it. It's got real developers chiming in their excitement for it. It's already a real product, prototyped and nearly ready to launch at its slated March 2013 date. It's $99, and it's actually got some pretty impressive hardware for the money.
This is all good stuff. Unfortunately it probably won't be enough. Open source almost always means you're limited to obscurity. Without a very large corporate conglomerate behind it, it won't have the marketing dollars or the clout to reach mainstream exposure. You also need something more robust than homebrew offerings to sell it on, because you can scarcely expect a group of hackers working in their spare time to produce a Gears of War. Add to that, there's a long history of previous efforts that tried to do the same thing that Ouya is and failed miserably to go beyond underground.
But there are a few things that are different this time. Aside from having some industry experience behind it, it's also a better value than most open hardware platforms. Most open source gaming devices are handhelds, and there's some inherent limitations when making a self-contained, portable device for a reasonable price. By simply being a box with the core hardware inside, you can afford a little extra oomph. Obviously this has been tried as well, such as with the EVO 2. However the EVO 2 is expected to be more expensive, and while it claims to launch this year ahead of Ouya, its internal hardware will be much inferior.
The Ouya uses a Tegra 3, which should hopefully be the highest performing variant. This gives you four Cortex-A9 processors at up to 1.6GHz. The GPU in the Tegra 3 is sadly not state-of-the-art for smartphone hardware. The PowerVR SGX 543MP4, used in the PSVita and 3rd gen iPad, is easily 2-3 times faster. Obviously though, Ouya is great deal cheaper than those devices.
The specs also include 1GB of RAM, 8GB flash built-in, bluetooth, 802.11n wireless, and a single USB 2.0 port. There's no word on an SD card slot, so hopefully that USB port has host controller support. The platform will be built around Android 4.0, but the way things are worded it sounds like it will utilize its own separate library of software, so Google Play apps may be out. This is one advantage that EVO 2 has, though that's not necessarily an advantage with gaming.
For that reason, the Ouya feels much more like a true gaming platform. The Android OS can present some bottlenecks when it comes to performance, as it's more difficult for software to get low-level access to the hardware, but at least with custom-made software this can be mitigated some. Should it ever take off, it will also be a boon for Tegra 3 devices, as assumably games optimized for Ouya will also benefit smartphones and tablets using the same SoC. It's for that reason that I could see NVIDIA lending a helping hand in getting Ouya support.
Obviously many are looking at Ouya and wondering, "What's the point?" It many respects it acts like a limited PC. Most people already own a desktop or laptop with an HDMI port that they can hook up to the TV without any additional expense, and have a vast library of games, emulators, and media capabilities piped into their living rooms. For that matter, many preexisting phones and tablets can do the same thing, with support for bluetooth or USB gamepads built into a lot of their games. How does Ouya survive if its intended niche is already filled by devices that people already own?
Well, that's where all that Kickstarter money might come in handy. In order for Ouya to take off in any meaningful way (because it seems pretty clear its creators aren't interested in just being kings of the underground), it's going to need to spend those investments wisely. It's going to need the best marketing campaign that a handful of millions can buy. It's going to need plenty of iterations to ensure the build quality is exceptional. More than anything though, it's going to have to court the big-name studios. It's also going to need to fund some game development directly, and it wouldn't hurt to license an already popular game (Minecraft?) as a pre-included title right out of the box.
It's clear they're going to have to hire some more people to get all that done. In an era of convergence, where future TVs will be serving all your OnLive/Netflix/DVR needs, it's hard to justify yet another dedicated hunk of electronics. It's harder still when it's an attempt at an unproven (or even debunked) market, and it's hard to say that focusing on F2P and exclusive content will be a differentiating factor. For $99, a device that can potentially do anything might sound pretty sexy though, provided anyone actually hears about it. The gaming industry could certainly use a breath of fresh air, and it would be great if Ouya could be the one to open the window.
