In the light of
http://forums.ouya.tv/discussion/1380/recovery-mode/ and the generally open nature of the console, Ouya Team, I'm sure you've thought more than once about what will happen if people decide to dump your launcher and go with something of a more traditional android flavor. I have in fact installed Nova Launcher, but I still have a shortcut to the stock launcher for when I pull out my controller to play. I prefer it and wish it would discover my sideloaded apps because the UI works so much better with the controller.
Let me both validate and encourage you. In my opinion this is actually the sharpest and most painful area in which you are trying to innovate. No one as of yet has in fact produced what I would call a viable solution. Google’s market suffers from discoverability issues. I haven’t looked much at the Xbox and Playstation implementations, but I don’t think the design intent was to promote the discovery and marketing of an incredibly long list of titles, all of varying quality.
Heck, look at boardgamegeek.com for inspiration. They do an incredibly good job of including ALL of the titles that exist, classifying and rating them. I was recently even able to pick out a list of only the cooperative games and choose one to buy from a brick-and-mortar. Crowd sourcing will definitely be important to help sort through and promote specimens of greatness out of the (relatively) massive amount of content.
Think along these lines, and probably bake in a (seamless) social aspect to get your villagers talking to each other about how much they like the best titles. Personally I would love to be able to showcase my choices on which games I think are gems. When I purchase an app (and before even), I should be presented with the option to “Display on your showcase?”. I would even be happy to see a checkbox at that point asking if I would like a prompt when I login to the online portal (online Ouya store/listing of some fashion, btw?) to write a blog post style review of why I like the game.
I have pondered the idea, but I don’t think I would go as far as creating a dedicated blog for the best Ouya games. You keep asking for marketing material for games- how about genuine reviews from satisfied customers? Those aren’t usually a incredibly difficult rarity to come by.. xD
Wajeemba
Posts: 8Member
Comments
The other difficulty is that few people are going to write reviews or anything wordy whilst on the console itself / using a console controller. Similarly, the idea of a checkbox on a console doesn't really work (and giving people too many options is a bad thing). Which is not to say your idea is bad, just that you need to think about the console context when making these features
Website