With 26 days to go and $4.4m already raised the Ouya is probably on course to the be the biggest Kickstarter-funded project since the last one. However the reaction from the industry and its press has been generally negative.
There are some fair assessments like that of Kris Graft, who welcomes disruption to the console space but is unsure if Ouya's the platform for the job. Then there are others who question whether it can be delivered on time, what the cost of manufacture could possibly be for it to "match up to expectations". There's even the comment from Jeff Gerstmann (of Giant Bombcast) that relying on Kickstarter is some sort of sleazy end-around tactic.
I think they're mostly missing the point. Unlike the Phantom, the Gizmondo and the Indrema, the people behind Ouya have proven on day one that there is a very excited market for a hackable console. Ouya taps into the same sentiment that's driving Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, Makies and so forth. It also verifies that there is great interest in an app-store, low power fun-games-on-TV machine as many wistullfy hope the Apple TV would become. In a word: resonance.
Almost nobody in games seems to have grasped that Kickstarter et al aren't charities (sorry Andrew) soliciting a few donations around business-as-usual. Crowdfunding is a direct manifestation of the marketing story, the cause in which people believe and want to see made happen (reason bedamned). The tribe is falling over itself wanting to give its money to make these kinds of project succeed, and yet the industry wants to tell us why they shouldn't.
This is probably what watching dinosaurs fight while meteors streak overhead looks like.
Comments