Famicom Dojo Podcast: Oh Yeah OUYA

This is actually the very first I had heard of this Ouya thing. On the surface, I’m interested, but the main reason I don’t play games that often, is that I don’t have time to actually sit in front of the TV. hat few games I play these days, is almost exclusively on my android or my wife’s iPhone. I don’t know about playing thee little handheld cellphone games on my big TV.

I will say this though – if the storage medium is an SD card, I can totally see the entire back catalog of NES, SNES, N64, etc fitting on a 32GB nicely. Honestly, that would probably be the biggest seller right there. I know my dad wold pay $100 for that.

I don’t know. I don’t plan to pony up on kickstarter, but if I saw this thing on the shelf at Best Buy, I’d probably bite.

Personally I feel super oppressed by that licensing (pardon my french) bullshit.  And I would totally support an honest console.  I may be one of those 10%ers..  But I don’t think that would be fair considering how much support they are getting.

The problem is that tying hardware to software is fundamentally wrong (in my opinion) and strongly so even.. I’m a software developer myself and I feel absolutely terrible about what the “lock ins” have been doing to what I would have once considered an honorable profession.  It hasn’t gotten as bad with games yet, but it’s definately starting.  Basically software companies have largely stopped making products and instead are working on getting money through license models and traps.

This “they have to survive” stuff is total bullshit.  People can make money by selling honest work.  You don’t have to trap people, you don’t need to trick and to screw people and make sure they have no alternative.  It’s been demonstrated that you can make money honestly (without the traps, tye-ins, etc), and when software worked this way, it was brilliant!  Now all oracle (for example) does is sit around and try to think of way to prevent customers from being able to use other products.. Not *entice* customers to use their stuff, you understand but to make sure people have no choice, they can’t take their data and use it on a competitor because Oracle has trapped them in as many ways as possible.  Then, instead of enticing people to buy their software, they charge the people who are trapped more and more.  Then, since many people are trapped, new people who want to work with these existing customers are also trapped.

To me, it makes me feel like I’m an industry of crooks instead of the hard working industry I signed up for and I would totally support anything that I thought was selling software in what I would consider to be an honest way again..

What will entice developers to release for the system is that there is going to be all these pre-orders filled, meaning all these people who will have this system will be wanting to buy your game!

I don’t think it’s true at all what you say that people will not pay because they are smart enough to get around it.  If you look at the Humble Bundles (which is awesome), for example, they are making millions selling the indie games, and they use a pay what you want model.  There is no need for hacking or anything, just put 1 cent as your price and you get around it..  Yet people buy.  Linux users, by the way on average pay the most per download everytime.

Unfortunately, I’m not really convinced that Ouya will really free us from these restrictions.  Like Vinnk mentioned, it’s basically just a phone in a box.

(pant… pant… pant… sorry)