NoNewTaleToTell: 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.

cogadh: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/27/razer-confirms-ouya-acquisition/

Razer apparently hasn't given up totally on their Forge microconsole, despite the fact that it still can't do some of the basic things promised at launch, like stream PC games to your TV or run Netflix. So they bought Ouya, not for its tech (which pales in comparison to the Forge), but for its game library. That's one way to build up your console offering,I guess?

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

Coelocanth: For the nonce, perhaps. But there are numerous acronyms that have become accepted as words. A few that spring to mind are 'snafu', 'scuba', and 'laser'.

*edit* Not sure if 'yolo' has made it into official 'word-dom' yet.

NoNewTaleToTell: 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.

jsjrodman: 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.

rtcvb32: Hmmm so bad design on it's connectivity, perhaps to maintain DRM? Bad handling will kill any system/game. The kinnect can attest to that, for as much push hype for force-feeding Microsoft did before quietly dropping it.

It seems a little odd though... Wouldn't you think Ouya would have contacted some large linux dev teams (Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware) found and figure out what would/wouldn't work for connectivity, interface and DRM and then worked with that? Then again... They did have other backers/funding so better opinions could have been vetoed by investors...

rampancy: Custom controller aside, it wasn't like the hardware was all that exotic, either. They were basically using the parts bin for a mid-range Android tablet. That may have been adequate when the hardware was first announced. However by the time they shipped you could buy a decently priced, Android-powered TV stick computer powered by cheaper competitors (like the RK3188), that could arguably do what the Ouya promised, and potentially even more as they ran stock Android and weren't limited to a proprietary store.

And speaking of which, what was also problematic was that they were promising the launch of a completely new software distrbution platform, on a time frame that was simply too aggressive and too fast for them to reasonably deliver on.

HijacK: Internet is still not as mainstream as people think, and while I come from a country with amazing connectivity and speed, the rest of the world is not as fortunate. The internet here in US is pretty shitty compared to back home.

rtcvb32: Hmmm... perhaps worse is how flooded the air is with transmissions. I think it was brought up in Extra Credits, where they talked of how saturated the airwaves are, while the large data bandwidth frequencies are still reserved for the old television antenna reception.

Prices for internet is crappy, wifi connections are crappy, internet for your phone is expensive and crappy... and 99% of the current transmissions basically replace television with access to streaming and YouTube. It's not really a good setup right up. :(

BillyMaysFan59: OUYA has got to be one of the biggest jokes I've seen on Kickstarter. Raises millions during the campaign, then (afaik) turns out to be a disappointing, underpowered Android device with a meager selection of worthwhile games.

HijacK: Ugh, I never knew it was that bad. I'm going to college now and they say the whole campus has wi-fi, but I'm already scared of how crappy it may be or how the traffic will be so high it will move at a snails pace.

HijacK: Interesting. I enjoyed the video. I had no idea this issue is so big. If the airwaves are saturated in the US, I'm wondering how they are in countries like Japan and China where the internet is used far more, especially since video games are a huge source of entertainment. Mobile gaming has been huge in Japan for more than a decade, while in China esports and online games are simply gigantic compared to most countries.