UPDATED 13:22 EDT / JANUARY 09 2013

NEWS

Boxer8 Provides a Peek at the Ouya Console; $99 a Pop in March 2013

Last week, the Boxer8 team gave Ouya developer consoles to some 1,200 Kickstarter investors who chipped in $699 and up to create the device. Feedback came in this week and they were pretty good. Ouya may not be ready for gamers yet, as the company itself said on the console’s home screen, but it appears that there’s a great deal to love about it. The console will be rolled out to the public on March 2013.

The package contained an Ouya console, two developer controllers with batteries, an HDMI cable, Micro-USB, and a power adapter. Developers say that Ouya is quite simple to connect and boot, pretty much like connecting an Xbox 360 to a TV.

Here’s a review from CodeZombieGames, a Youtube channel:

“I thought I would chime in here and kind of explain why the Ouya is good,” the CodeZombieGames reviewer comments on one of his videos. “I have actually used many Android TV top devices. Many of them cost from $60 to $200. Some are from China, others are consumer products [available in North America] like … Google TV. Nearly all of these devices are disappointing when it comes to OpenGL performance.”

“The Ouya on the other hand is a Tegra 3 device, and is capable of actually playing 3D games,” he continued. “I have gotten [the] AngryBots Unity demo to work on [the] Ouya and it runs smoothly.”

Still there are a few developers who see flaw in Ouya. Loren Brichter, the man behind Twitter client, Tweetie, pointed out a few problems about the console. Though it can sustain a business as it finds fans among the niche tech/indie gaming market, he said it would difficult for the device to go mainstream success. Competing with xBox 360 and the app-store enabled Apple TV would also be difficult, atop the fact that Ouya encourages rooting.

Ouya will sell for $99 in the US as announced last July, and £99 in the UK. They are funding a 10-day game development competition for contenders to create an Ouya-compatible app. The game will start on January 14 and end on January 23, and with a $45,000 prize to the winning developer.

Development of Ouya console was first announced in July, and its weird spherical shape drew a lot of attention. A week after said announcement, they received $2.3 million in financial support after launching a Kickstarter crowd funding project, with some 19,000 investors betting their cards on the device. Check out this interesting insight about Ouya Console from Kyt Dotson, SiliconANGLE’s game specialist.

See all CES coverage here!

Like any other spawning technology, Ouya is best coupled with a rival. Ouya gets an opponent in Gamestick, a fellow Android-based micro-console developed by California-based PlayJam, and is backed by Kickstarter. Gamestick was reported to have recently surpassed the $135,000 funding mark. There’s Sunflex as well, an Android-based portable gaming device with a gamepad controller. NVIDIA also announced its Project SHIELD yesterday, an Android-based console that runs on Tegra 4 processors.


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