Where can the Ouya go?

Today we’ll take a slight detour since something caught my eye. I want to talk about the Ouya. For those of who you have not been following the Kickstarter grapevine, Ouya is the brainchild of Julie Uhrman and Yves Bahar, it’s purpose is to be the mass market, value focused alternative to other gaming consoles. It supposedly boasts a lot of user friendly, out of the box capabilities and a LOT of indie developer friendly features such as being on an open source platform, etc.

The kickstarter campaign itself generated a huge amount of buzz, raising almost $9M in kickstarter funds, only to vanish quickly after. Apparently, consumer reactions to the product was… very underwhelming. That was last year.

This year, Ouya has abandoned the crowdfunding-only route and have raised a series A round of investor capital from VCs like Occam Capital so forth to the tune of $15M.

Apparently, despite it’s growing pains, people still have a tremendous amount of faith in Ouya and the role it can play in the market. It makes sense, actually. The $9M in crowdfunding alone shows that this is a very real market opportunity and that demand exist.

What is missing right now is the execution. The Ouya itself had a couple of usability problems in it’s design such as the way the online store worked, and a number of other substitution threats that exists within it’s native market.

It also had a considerable problem with it’s most important task: onboarding killer content that help move units. As ExtremeTech put it, “there just aren’t enough worthwhile games to play”.

Evidently, the Ouya management team themselves are cognizant of this, as the new lineup now has a number of fairly high profile titles like Sonic the Hedgehog, Shadowrun Online, and Walking Dead Season 2 from Talltales games. Admittedly though, these titles are still far more indie than mainstream as of this point. The one title that would have really been able to push this would have been NFL Madden 12. A title of that caliber probably would have served as an effective market grab.

However, it remains to be seen if these titles alone will be enough. What Ouya needs is not just a hit, but a runaway smash hit. And that’s incredibly difficult to do. After all, she will need to convince people that it is worth investing AAA dollars into an unproven platform. $9M might be great for the indie gaming crowd, but it is not all that alluring for the Activisions and EAs of the world.

The narrative here is simple: will the indie market alone be enough to give Ouya enough traction to eventually take on the mainstream AAA market? Or will Uhrman be able to convince the market content leaders to jump on board the Ouya train and become an instant contender for the next gen console wars?

If Uhrman’s past as builder of media distributor or her ability to forge a valuable partnership with one of the big dogs pays off (and really, all she needs is one), then the Ouya could still be a juggernaut yet.

For myself, I chose to remain cautiously optimistic about the Ouya’s prospects. Lord knows it would be nice if I didn’t have to take out another mortgage payment just to play the latest games.