Seems to be priced for "$99, why the hell not at that price?"
My hand keeps hovering over the button to pay $99 now and get the console on release, purely because this thing is priced the same amount as 6 hours or so on Canal Street with the other half (I am a prolific drinks buyer and consumate gentleman so I mostly pay for everything, so I actually make out pretty well only spending ~£60 in that time).
But I have a few concerns.
It's fabulously hard to become a successful hardware manufacturer today. There's a reason SEGA essentially died, why Atari's last successful console was like 30 years ago when their last console was about 15 years ago. It's because they didn't sell that well. Even with the kickstarter preorders they're looking at an install base of 40,000. Which is sweet fuck all. It won't entice any big developers. Likely this means it'll be stuck with ports of mobile phone games and a few bones thrown by some smaller indies. That's fine for the Ouya guys, they might be able to sustain this and make their money from it. But it'll die quite quickly
Bear in mind that of that $2.5m, $1,774,733 is literally preorders for the console, and a big chunk of the remainder is a small (sub 1000) number wealthy(ish) people (In fact, at levels lower than the preorder level, the kickstarter has only provided about $22,000).
I also worry that they're dangerously close to offering more consoles than they can have made, their initial backer "preorder" was 1000 consoles, which sold in minutes, so they added 5000 more, then another 5000, then another 10,000. Failing to deliver on this could fairly massively damage all the goodwill gained from making somethign unique, interesting and open source.
Ouya is the kind of thing that gets a cult following, and things like that can be successful, but I think they need to shoot for a higher install base than "cult", or developers won't be interested. Lack of developers leads to the install base not growing as people become disinterested, leads to lack of developer interest leads to....etc.
I'm starting to suspect that the initial buzz for Ouya has already peaked on Kickstarter, don't expect to see it make 2.5 million in a day again, or even 1.5 million, I think everyone who wants to know or cares to know about Ouya probably already knows and probably has already backed (give or take a few, give or take double or even triple the amount of the current backers, it's still too small an install base).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
