I think it's important to place their numbers in the context of mainstream consoles. In today's living room, you have Wii (95M), Xbox 360 (67M), and PS3 (64M).

That's ~226 million consoles. The OUYA is selling well for two days, for sure, but it's a tiny fraction of the big players.

They've had 26k backers in two days. They could do 13k backers per day for an entire year and end up with ~5M consoles sold (8% of the smallest console, or 2.2% of all three). It isn't enough to get the attention of any big games. They best they'll do are Android ports.

It isn't enough to put out cheap hardware for Android. They need a seriously good storefront, a seriously good integration/account system, or a seriously good controller. They aren't taking any of these three seriously, as far as I know, so I do think pessimism is warranted.

If anything, their success at grabbing attention should put more fuel on the fire for Valve's rumored console...

I've been comparing this to the GP2X, which I loved. Great emulators, great ports, and some fun original games, with no need for a giant userbase. That coupled with a media center would be entirely worth it to me.

You are thinking about the GP32, which I had and it was awesome and had a ton of community support.........until the PSP.

Think that back then the only portable out there was the GBA which had awful specs compared to the GP32. There was literally nothing else, the GameGear and NeoGeo Pocket were dead, and a Palm could barely emulate an old B&W Gameboy.

Today you have smartphones, tablets, smartTVs, set-top devices like the googleTV and appleTV, and all of them can do what the Ouya does. Is not the same situation the GP32 had, when the best you could get was a GBASP with a weak ARM7 with no FPU and a grainy QVGA screen.

When the GP2X launched it was already too late, the PSP was cheaper and more powerful, and the most important part: it could be modified to do what 99% of all GP32 users wanted, which was running emulators. And it was even better at that: a much better screen and enough power to emulate a N64, while the GP32 could barely handle Genesis games.

Ironically that was the PSPs undoing: far too many people buying it for emulators and piracy, so devs who were initially enthusiastic about it (first portable in over a decade that could dethrone Nintendo) eventually gave up on it.

Excellent comment, too bad I can only upvote once!

The problem is that this space gets oversaturated easily and the fallout is quick and brutal. Remember the Jaguar? 3DO? Dreamcast? The Phantom?

All of them had fan support and all of them failed in the marketplace (and the "open source" Phantom never even made it to market).

There's less vendor lockin with consoles now. Fewer titles are platform exclusive. Online services are much important than they used to be (notice there's little to no mention of this in the promo video). The question becomes bigger than, "How does this console compete with the Xbox?" (which is already a HUGE question), it becomes "How doe this console compete with Xbox Live?".

This product is going to be openly competing with big, established players with lots of cash and decades of experience. And it's not just the big 3 console makers. They're competing with SmartPhones and iPad gaming too, basically any electronic gaming experience you can having sitting on the couch in your living room.

Fans of hackable linux boxen and hardcore gamers are always super enthusiastic, but I don't think that demo is large enough to help a company succeed in the way this company needs to succeed.

"All of them had fan support and all of them failed in the marketplace"

But the people who are most likely to buy it day one just did, on Kickstarter. Ouya just crowdsourced the customer, the product message, and the marketplace.

"The question becomes bigger than, 'How does this console compete with the Xbox?' (which is already a HUGE question), it becomes 'How doe this console compete with Xbox Live?'."

How does Steam compete with Games for Windows or EA Origin if it is orders of magnitude smaller than both? How does the iPod Touch and iPhone compete with (and dominate) the dedicated gaming devices PSP/Vita and 3DS? How did the Wii compete with the 360 and PS3?

Smaller players with cheaper devices that require no initial player investment or outlay can be adopted en masse. Think about where HTC or Huawei or LG or Vizio were before they became near the tops worldwide in consumer electronics. Vizio wasn't even on the radar 10 years ago, now they are the #1 maker of TVs in the largest market in the world.

> How does Steam compete with Games for Windows or EA Origin if it is orders of magnitude smaller than both?

Did you swap this around? Steam is much larger and more profitable, and has been around longer than either.

> How does the iPod Touch and iPhone compete with (and dominate) the dedicated gaming devices PSP/Vita and 3DS?

The iPhone competes because the hardware as a gaming device has an effective cost of $0, because you already bought it for it's phone functions.

> How did the Wii compete with the 360 and PS3?

And it seems weird to compare Nintendo with Ouya, Nintendo is a large game company with a lot of experience in this field, and competes due to a cheaper console that is innovating in a new and novel way.

Funny you should bring up the Phantom. This thing reminds me so very much of the phantom. I remember trying to buy a Phantom dev kit and just being told that they're "coming soon" for ages. Then they came out with the Phantom lapboard, and folded.

I don't know if it's the look of the console, or the way this was all presented, but it's all far too reminiscent of the Phantom for me. I'm staying well clear of this.

Just an aside: I miss my dreamcast, best controller ever.

In what way does this company need to succeed?

I think that the point is that it's unlikely to.

Great. Many people have stated that and given why they believe that will be the case.

But my question is what will count as success? What will it take for this company to succeed? What are the pieces?

As a visitor to this site, that's the kind of thinking I'm really looking for.

I think the problem is that it's difficult to think of a realistic scenario in which this could succeed.

I think the hardware could become popular as a cheap way to run pirated games, however this would probably scare away developers.

I think there's a fair amount of honest skepticism around the pricing, which isn't the same as simple mean-spiritedness.

I for one really really want this project to succeed! However, I'm afraid that they weren't realistic about the costs associated with building the hardware. But I look forward to be proven wrong.

I got the impression that they already know what it's going to cost for the first production run. They showed the parts they're using, they obviously know what their costs are. They'd have to be complete morons to price it at $99 if it might cost more. And I'm sure the retail price would be higher, maybe $150 or more.

Here's my problem with it: I have an iPhone, an Android tablet, a gaming PC, and consoles. I don't play the same games on my phone that I play on my consoles or PC. They're different experiences. I expect different game experiences from an Xbox 360 than my PC.

Unfortunately, the perception that I have is that that when this system is released, it's going to be mostly ports of existing Android games.

The problem is that you shouldn't be getting those games for the system. They were designed for touchscreens, not touchpads. They weren't designed for controllers, and almost none of them actually have multiplayer. Canalbolt, which is the featured "Play on your TV" image, is just a one-button runner. Not anything I want to play on a TV.

So this means that for the OUYA to really succeed, they need games that are for the OUYA. They shouldn't be be straight ports of Android games. They should be unique experiences that utilize the OUYA's unique control scheme. Success for the system is entirely dependent on the software available on it, and I just don't see that happening, especially with the short release cycle.

Most of the games in the video they have on KS are trivial to modify for OUYA.

The negativity is skepticism that they can deliver what they're promising, and concern over the fallout if they don't.

It's not a character attack.

The nice thing is that you almost certainly will get some kind of hardware in your hands out of this project for $99. Compare that to years of vaporware hardware where a big announcement is followed by nothing but spending lots of money and never releasing anything.

Getting the hardware is not a certainty. Kickstarter does not guarantee that you will get anything out of the projects that you give money too.

True, but I don't really see how that is particular to this project though. And I've had good luck with other $100 hardware products on KS.

Specific skepticisms are quite warranted, I agree, and time will tell. All the same, it seems worth remembering that as Kickstarter has some success, it is probably going to be making enemies who will use their established positions to, at the very least, trash-talk it and anything coming out of it.

All this seems to be is Android with a new brand, though. The specs are the same as modern phones and you can already attach a gamepad to Android and your phone to a TV.