Maybe the market is just expecting and wanting too much. Honestly with the emergence of a LOT of indie games and games that don't require a lot of power, or don't require as much power, the Ouya should have done fine. Not every game has to be Bioshock Infinite level of graphical and audio work, i've been happy with HammerWatch graphics, or emulating old consoles and playing the old Megaman titles and whatnot. My Xbox probably has seen far more use for emulation than main system games... (Not to mention a few of them refuse to play in english...)

I don't see a price to compare against with those products, the Ouya was priced at $99... May as well look it up. (Grabbed from Wikipedia)

Ouya: $99
Razer Forge: $100
Nvidia Shield: $200

Hmm price for price the Razer Forge would have been better, which then comes down to taste or modability. The shield on the other hand... personally i dislike handhelds due to the tiny screen, and at 2x the price i'm not sure. But that's my thoughts on it.

Still any of these systems are considerably better than what we used to get for main top of the line systems ten years ago.

Wrong Shield. Those are the specs for the Shield TV box, not the handheld or tablet. I know, its confusing. Nvidia couldn't be bothered to come up with different names for three different products.

While some games out there might not need much hardware to run, those are not the games a game console is targeting, which is where Ouya lost it. People want console quality on their TV box, not cell phone quality. The Ouya could barely do that.

If we're comparing prices then I'm more than happy with a 80-90$ PlayStation TV (basically a PS Vita that connects to the TV) where I can enjoy PS1, PS2, PSP, and PS Vita games and that I can mod to play mobile games.

Ouya....the name alone makes me want to buy one just to smash it into pieces with a baseball bat. Ouya sounds like booyah. And Ouya and booyah belongs in the same group, the word YOLO belongs in. The group of words that should be permanently erased.

Agreed. These are not words. I don't care if they end up with an entry in the OED, these will never be words. >:(

Ouya Wouldn't Want To Be Ya :P

My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

Yeah, that was just cruel and unusual, I should edit it out.

Calling them disappointing is pretty fair. Naive fits. Fools perhaps.

The way they ran their company with the initial funding they received was idiotic. But really that's kind of typical over here in California startup culture. Most of the companies fail spectacularly, but some produce serious steps forward. Or at least serious sources of money for someone.

I don't believe there was any intent to scam, anymore than most startup-oriented businesses are scams. The intent is to transfer a pile of wealth from the general stock trading market into the pockets of the venture capitalists. Or alternatively from the buying company.

That most fail and cause a loss for the VCs is balanced by the successes that pay off at ludicrous multiples.

But I don't think the customers were in any way intended to be scammed.

Full Disclosure: i liked the idea. Giving accses to a larger screen and controller (optionally) to the huge pile of mobile games? I dunno, some of those mobile games are pretty good, even if most are awful, and while I can't stand gaming on a phone, I might have enjoyed playing some on a larger screen now and then. E.g. Towerfall etc.

Of course I didn't buy one because I was waiting for enough of a catalogue to be worth bothering.

Lacking a library would cause it to fail as a gaming system... but if it was good enough also as a computer in general (and android being Linux based), i certainly don't see it as bad if it was someone's (or their kid's) computer while they waited for games to be added.

More than once i've heard of kickstarters for game companies to start in California/San Fransisco... Apparently it's very expensive. Which is quite sad...

They're in Santa Monica. (that's around 6-7 hours of driving away from San Francisco).

But this analysis misses the point. You don't generate startups where it's cheap, you generate startups where you can find the talent to work on the goal.

The level of waste in startup businesses isn't about the cost of living, or the cost of office space (though they are factor), but more about imprudent spending. It's a (mis)management problem, not a salary problem.

Yes, once your startup turns into a big success, and you have 500 employees, you might wish you weren't in San Francisco, if you're the CFO or whatever, but if you tried to launch a crazy new idea in Omaha, you'd never get off the ground in the first place.

I'll also add that the software itself seems iffy. I know a lot of people had trouble with updates hanging and freezing the system, updates being forced while in the middle of a game, and issues connecting to the internet and to the store and apps. Of course that's just on the software side and for all I know those issues might've been fixed.

The controls themselves have been described as flimsy, awkward and generally just a waste of plastic.

To add a little more understanding why a lot of people think Ouya is a joke, they had a promotion where any dev that raised at least fifty thousand dollars via crowdfunding would have their total crowdfunding amount matched by Ouya.

The first two games that came close to reaching that goal were a little dubious. Elementary, My Dear Holmes reached its goal of fifty thousand but was eventually suspended by Kickstarter. Gridiron Thunder managed to get funded despite some EXTREMELY shady backing, Ouya was going to go ahead and pay the Gridiron Thunder devs anyway until the other Ouya devs got very vocal about leaving, when that happened Ouya and the Gridiron Thunder devs had a meeting and decided that the Gridiron Thunder devs would drop out of the promotion. A third game called Dungeons: The Eye of Draconus also met its goal but was removed from the contest after it was revealed that most of the funding came from the devs father.

In short, the first several games that met the goal of the contest were all very shady at best, Ouya was going to fund the last two anyway until the community got out their torches and pitchforks, and probably would've funded the first had their kickstarter not been shutdown.

Well, you are correct. YOLO is not a word. It's an acronym. :P

Yeah, I think this was the biggest failure in estimating the difficulty of the Ouya project. Industrial design of heavy-use electronics is not trivial, and you're not going to get it right your first time without a ton of experience in the field.

Also agreed, the funding irregularities for games should have been writing on the wall that the company wasn't capable of leading such a project to success.