Kickstarter Console Project Meets $950K Goal In Eight Hours

I don't understand the point of this. Why not just use a PC?

@geirr: All Americans hate this product. We do. We all hate it. ALL OF US. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Not one American man, woman, or child enjoys the idea of this product. If only we were as amazing as every other country on the planet then maybe, MAYBE we could find it in the depths of out black and tiny hearts to love this console. I speak on behalf of ALL Americans EVERYWHERE.

@iAmJohn said:

I'm just throwing it out there: this is a terrible idea for a console and the people who have made this succeed are bad people.

I mean, forget how awful Android is as a platform in general with its general lack of standards for everything including apps and compatibility across versions, they're launching this thing on Ice Cream Sandwich? That makes a lot of sense - use an Android base that only 10% of Android users even use with Jelly Bean coming out really soon. Great thinking there guys; that's not going to worsen the market fragmentation issue at all!

The Xbox 360 runs Windows NT, so using an old OS literally means nothing when questioning it's success.

Why is everybody assuming they'll only play phone games on this? :o

It's probably powerful enough to run games like Super Meat Boy and Bindings of Isaac as well. People just read "Android" and go ape-shit crazy.

@TMThomsen: Because they haven't read the pitch or watched the video. They heard "Android" and acted like someone shit in their cereal.

@Brodehouse said:

@Korolev said:

Can we be sure it's not some kind of scam? Remember the aptly named Phantom?

Do you remember the people who were making the Phantom? They had an office with nothing in it, and said the craziest shit unprovoked.

Yeah, the people working on the project have some degree of clout, like Ed Fries. He's a cool dude. I mean, he made Halo for the Atari 2600. Awesome.

Hey Alex, are you gonna interview these guys? This looks like madness.

I'm not sure what it says that the thing I'm genuinely most curious about is what the D-pad on this thing is gonna be like. Sure, it could shake the the entire console landscape, yadda yadda, whatever. How's the D-pad feel?

If they want to keep to their budget they could always retrofit old Randy Savage promos for advertising.

OU-YA!

Whoa, this thing is almost at 1.5 mil . . .

No idea if I'll get this or not, I mean I probably won't. But I still want to see how it turns out.

I could not care less about the number or quality of the games that are going to be available. This thing is a forerunner of what household technology needs to be. The specs aren't great, the platform's touchy, the open nature will make it a fractured mess. It may very easily fail to cause any ripples. But the greatest advancements in software have come from shattered, open systems.

@solidlife said:

This seems really dumb but Hey prove me wrong!

This 100%. Nothing about this sounds appealing to me, but I would love for it to come out and actually turn out to be the shit.

@kagato said:

@FuriousJodo said:

@iAmJohn said:

I'm just throwing it out there: this is a terrible idea for a console and the people who have made this succeed are bad people.

I mean, forget how awful Android is as a platform in general with its general lack of standards for everything including apps and compatibility across versions, they're launching this thing on Ice Cream Sandwich? That makes a lot of sense - use an Android base that only 10% of Android users even use with Jelly Bean coming out really soon. Great thinking there guys; that's not going to worsen the market fragmentation issue at all!

Yeah I don't understand why people are freaking out about it. It's essentially an Android phone you plug into your TV. I really don't see it being very successful, it's not like you're going to be playing the new Assassin's Creed on this or anything.

Actually you kind of could with the OnLive app, it works on all my android devices including my ICS phone and i can play all of the current Assassins Creed games on there just now. Its not going to be as clean or as sharp as a proper console version, but people really shouldnt write it off just yet.

There's already a product coming out from Vizio that runs Android, and has OnLive support.

http://www.vizio.com/costar/overview

I like the idea of being able to throw a prototype together in GameSalad or something and have it work in short order on the big screen. Could be extremely useful from a creative standpoint.

@Korolev said:

Can we be sure it's not some kind of scam? Remember the aptly named Phantom?

Or like this

"We get it – smartphones and tablets are getting all the new titles – they're "what's hot.”"
 
Huh?

fantastic idea. haters gonna hate. i will reserving my gamertag thank you very much!

This is potentially pretty interesting, I'll probably keep an eye on it. If it ends up just being a 'play phone games on a tv' device then no thanks. A well made controller is good an all but games are gonna make or break this thing.

Well at least they made the buttons flat. Though I'd love to make a simple game and put it on there for free.

@Oy: Patrick ran an article about this very subject a few weeks ago. Microsoft puts little emphasis on their Indie Games sector. Being that this is Android-based, the developer doesn't have to answer to Microsoft and can make changes as he or she sees fit.

I think this concept looks terrific. The Android space has plenty of talented devs that could make this notion of an open source game console appealing.

This scared me at first. So much money and so many people focusing in on this.. thing that I don't understand. I'm a bit concerned for everyone involved. This is a huge project and a huge commitment.

But the more I scrutinize it, the more I'm starting to understand where this hopes to fit in. This isn't going to rival any existing console. It's going to be extremely niche, at least for a while. But I can see the appeal in what it does. I may even want to be a part of it some day. The promise of a proper console that doesn't have the best hardware is sort of freeing in a way, especially coupled with how open they're aiming to make it. Some of my favorite 360 games, for instance, were wasted on the 360. They could've run on something much less complicated and expensive, but there was no alternative at the time. Other than the PC, but that's where publishing deals and uncertain hardware restrictions start making things fuzzy. This won't have any of that.

Maybe it doesn't need to exist. Maybe it won't last very long. But I hope it does well, because getting into my developer pants, I'm very comfortable with what it's proposing. And looking at what kind of games I've been playing the most in the last couple of years, I'd probably find a place for it as a gamer, as well. It certainly seems more viable to me than mobile gaming, and I've missed out on a lot of good little games because of that... So good luck, oddly named niche indie console thing! Maybe I'll meet you on the other side!

Even if the gaming part turns out to suck, this could turn out to be a great set-top box for streaming video if the right people start messing around with it.

I'm so intrigued an so not a fan at the same time.

Guess what! i can plug my HD android phone into the tv already! and android games are made for touch screens, on the go anyway, even if they have cool new indie games i'd rather play them on my phone.

sound great and all, but it should have support for any controllers that works on the PC/android

That woman looks like she has no soul... no business person has a soul though so why am I surpirsed?

Oh well if the guy who made fucking Xotic is in, so am I! (sarcasm, that game was a giant piece of shit)

I still don't get the appeal of this "console". I can do all this shit on my PC with just a £5 HDMI cable. Then the games seem to just consist of flash games/phone games?
 
Yeah, no thanks.

Somehow I think people are going to get burned. There's no accountability, no guarantee that this guy has to deliver anything. In one day he raised over a million dollars, why not take the money and run? Why not just keep setting up kickstarters with nothing more than some jpegs?

At the very least Tim Schafer is someone who can accosted in person by the Giant Bomb crew about his kickstarter project.

at $99.00 dollars its worth it ,on top of that there are allot of cool games on android give me the ability to play them with a controller and I am hooked.

@Psychohead said:

I'm not sure what it says that the thing I'm genuinely most curious about is what the D-pad on this thing is gonna be like. Sure, it could shake the the entire console landscape, yadda yadda, whatever. How's the D-pad feel?

I would be surprised if their controller doesn't break some copyright or something.

I think both Sony and Microsoft have been taken to court because of their controller tech.

@Mr_JPeps said:

My biggest question so far is if all the games a free to play and people are dubbing this the "indie machine" or "the developers console of choice" how can that be so? If all a player or consumer pays for upfront is the box and all the games are free then how am "I" the "developer" paid? Are their ad's like crazy? People also don't seem to remember that there are some malicious apps out on the Android store as well. If my billing info is going to be on this box, or on this server, and its open source and people can make whatever they want and publish it to the service without any curating process and people are being told to hack the thing. whats stopping someone from publishing an app designed to steal whatever info is stored on the box or the server, or designed to over heat the machine and kill it?

I'm all for change, and throwing a wrench in the gears of the big 3 does put a smile on my face, but there are just still to many unanswered questions, and i wish people would take a moment and think about what they are being told and how this works before throwing money and praise from every direction.

According to the kickstarter page it sounds like one of the constants of the console is that it will have a curated store and that at most developers only need to release a demo for their game and not make them all free-to-play.

@PrivateIronTFU said:

@Bassman2112: I can't stop coming.

All over your mom's face.

That was uncalled for.

Also, that controller looks bulky and shitty.

Now I can get almost impossible games for free then get constantly harrangued to pay $1 if I spend more than thirty seconds working out a puzzle!

THANKS KICKSTARTER! Clearly the Ouya will revolutionise gaming as we know it.

Christ, just typing that made me vomit in my mouth a little.

To me, this thing seems like it could potentially be the home-version of the Arduino chip. The stuff hackers will be able to do with this is going to go FAR beyond gaming. I'm actually not interested in this thing for gaming AT ALL. Android without touch is like windows mobile on PDA's back in the day. There's really no reason to go there.. But, the open platform is definitely going to be a boon for this device. I'm guessing 5-7 months after its release we'll see a LOT of crazy shit being done with them. Crazy and probably also useful. I'm guessing you could hook a portable drive up to it and use it as a media player for your livingroom without many problems. Depending on the success, streaming platforms would probably develop apps for them, maybe the android apps already out would work pretty much out of the box as well.

I actually REALLY hate android, but the open nature of it really lends itself to stuff like this. Finally a useful way to use a mediocre OS.

they've already sold >11,500 consoles. That's pretty insane

open game console? Like a PC?

I guess it's cheaper than hooking a computer up to the tv... With some of the functionality?

Why does that lady keep talking about developing games for televisions like they just magically play games on their own?

Also, if "the most important part is the controller", you've already messed up...wait...I didn't realize what I was saying...sorry Nintendo.

Also also, everything about that promo video just comes off as extreme pandering from a bunch of random people who know nothing about the game industry.

Uh, why would I want to ever get this? Nobody is going to develop ANYTHING for it.

You know you can hook up a PC to a TV and that's easy to develop for... so whos this for?

What the...

All the way through this news post I was assuming it was a heldheld console (why else would it be on Android and use phone hardware?). It wasn't until the last paragraph I realized it was a home console. The thing went from cool to mindbendingly stupid pretty fast for me.

This sounds like a PC you plug into your TV. Except with Android OS, which no developer will be developing AAA titles for because of its open sourceness... open source is a scary phrase to big wigs, to them it means easy piracy...

Interesting, but talk to me when you have a lot of real games for it. I'll consider it then.

I don't need a $100 Android device.

So... can we expect a SNES emulator for this thing?

Well this is certainly interesting, but I'm having a hard time trying to figure out who it's for.

I don't really know why people are hating this so much, I like this thing, specially if it gets developers to make better iOS games.

@AndrewB said:

@Emperor_Jimmu said:

@kpaadet said:

@Emperor_Jimmu said:

Isn't the PC an open platform that lets devs make games cheaply?

But they want you to play on your TV man!

That is a good point. If only my PC had a HDM... I... oh, it does have a HDMI port. I'm not sure who it is that wants to play games on their TV but are dissatisfied with PC/console games. She is very excited about televisions.

If she was a man, she'd say balls. So much like Peter Molyneux.

Liver-spotted balls?

Seems pretty cool, but I already have a PC that can do all of what that lady says in the video and more.

I can already hook up my android device to my HDtv.  There would have to be some major game development for this thing as right now mobile games are just a time killer for me when I need it.