Am I the only person enraged by this?
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/07/ouya-annual/Ouya, consoles are NOT mobile. General mobile owners are happy with simple games and apps, and avid owners are happy to buy a new device every 1-2 years. Console owners want to play games without the headache of wether the game will run well or not on their devices, while the avid graphics-hungry gamers are already flocked on the PC. On top of that, this puts the ouya on a similar TCO of big consoles. In 4 years that'll be $400, already surpassing the launch cost of the Wii U.
Not to mention the possibility of a Duke Nukem Forever effect, with developers trying to push the platform by making graphically impressive games having to delay the game's launch several times because they need to keep updating the game for the newer hardware.
Jack_Mcslay
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Seriously though, just from a PR perspective, OUYA need to stop talking about mobile, and especially that dirty word "Android", as it just doesn't float with consumers. Game devs can find out later that oh by the way, it's built on android, making it easier to make the games. But in the eyes of the game player, Android in particular has connotations of shovelware and generally lower quality, smaller scope games with grind-fest f2p mechanics that make many games feel like glorified slot machines
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PC games get away with it because players are already used to fine-tuning their graphics settings for optimal performance/looks, but the console audiences want out-of-the-box experiences.
Having it be 2 years AND requiring developers to have all features available for gamers with the previous-gen ouya would be much better. You still get a reasoanable 4-year window and won't have to deal with several versions of the console.
If anything, the yearly update should be more subtle, like having more storage
How powerful is "more powerful"? They can't know for sure until they get their hands on the hardware, and we're still months away before Tegra 4 devices are released to the general public. So by the time they get it released, the developers start working at it, and odds are they will finish it close to the time the next ouya comes out, and if anything they might be able to patch it later for better framerate/filters but not to actually make graphics on par with the hardware.
Big consoles are able to make up for it because the hardware usually already exists years prior to the release of the console, altough more expensive, and therefore they're able to build fairly accurate dev kits for early developers. The same doesn't apply here because Tegra 3 is already top-of-the-line in it's category.
Kinda like the minsdk version for the os.
NES vs. Master System & Atari 7800? Not even close.
Mega Drive vs. SNES? Nope, toe-to-toe in this one, it took years of sega's mistakes for them to be surpassed.
PS2 vs. Xbox & Gamecube? Not at all.
X360 vs. PS3? Not even PS2's popularity saved PS3 from lagging behind
Creating LODs is not as straightforward as you may think. For example, if you use one model with all the fingers, you won't be able to use that UV on a lod that has a fused fingers hand, if you model a helmet separate from the head, you can't reuse the UV on a LOD that has the helmet fused to the head. On realistic graphics you can probably just bake everything, but on paint-y graphics common in several indie games such as Trine, Torchlight and Giana sisters you'd have to redraw the UV textures. Not to mention the large undertaking that is ramping up levels themselves.
But next year I have to target two OUYA's - if I tune my game perfectly for one of them, the other suffers. I'll have to either tune the game for the new device and have it run or look like crap on the old one, or tune it for the old one and then what's the point of the new console? More realistically, it'll end up in the middle, not being as good as it could be on either system. It'll be designed to take advantages of some of the new console's extra power, while still being low-end enough that it's still somewhat playable on the old console. And I'll always have to be learning how to take advantage of each new console's abilities, so won't have time to really master any single OUYA hardware.
This is where PC's and cell phones are, it's why GPU manufacturers can put out amazing looking demos for their new graphic cards but no game looks anything like those for years, it's why you end up with situations like the new Sim City where they design the game for modern PC's but then limit the city sizes to super small for all hardware so that old hardware can run the game. It's how an XBox 360 with 2-year old graphics architecture at launch can have graphics comparable with PC, and can survive for 6 years without an upgrade, graphics constantly getting better while PC graphics only tend to get better when you buy new hardware.
I'm more in favor of a 2 year cycle than a annual one. As @Dreamwriter said, constantly having to make your new project also work well on older hardware, which is already a massive pain in the mobile space, is just another headache to worry about. It's just more time, more money spent in order not to alienate a consumer base.
I couldn't agree more with @SpoonThumb, OUYA needs to stop the comparison the mobile, I think it may be doing more harm than good. Every site I go to that has an article related to OUYA, there are a plethora of comments that are the exact same, "why do I want to play mobile games on my TV", or "so pointless, I don't like mobile games", etc. WE as developers know this is not the case, but to others, they see it as a system that plays cell phone game ports on a TV screen.
I could be completely mistaken and a yearly cycle can work out perfectly for OUYA. I totally understand their reasoning, it get's the latest tech to devs and makes the console more relevant in comparison to other consoles. Just thinking longer term, don't want this to be an Apple situation where a consumer purchases an OUYA 8 months into it's life cycle, only to be outdated in 4 months by OUYA 2. Regardless, shall keep open minded about the whole situation.
Nexus Game Studio | @ NexusGameStudio
Sounds like a good idea at first. I mean using nvidia's solution would mean backwards compatiblility. Thats on thing consoles don't really do right becuase they change the hardware so drasticly. but every year? Technically speaking tegra 3 is already 2 years old since announced in febuary of 2011, but developers are just starting to show what it can do. Look at the tegra zone and the line of tegra enhanced games vs the cross device version.
I think what the ouya guys are missing out on is that cellular phone manufactures make all there $ on the hardware and contracts, not the software, in fact the software aspect is an after thought. Consoles are the opposite, why do you think that the big guys even consider taking a hit when it comes to the hardware. Doe's the Ouya needs to wait 5+ years for an update, NO. and this is where it can seperate it's self from the traditional console cycle. Does it need on every year though, Don't see a point.
I'm sure the ouya crew will run their camp how they see fit and Devs will do what they want. At this point I'm getting confused though. Is the ouya a console or a phone wanting to be a console? The whole PR behind it also makes things more of a mess. We all know android as a mobile platform so for them to put it at the forefront of their campaign is the reason why so many people are unsure about it. Then this news about uprading yearly adds to the point of it being more of a phone becasue we all think that yearly upgrade is a mobile thing.
A word of advice and a truthful fact, if sony, microsoft and nintendo all lisend to the mockery of PC gamers and critics about underpowered hardware, then they wodn't be doing so well would they.
OUYA won not because it was a small console with slowish Tegra3. It won because it is a hackable console with Android. And even if no games were made directly for it people knew it would be able to run SNES, DOS, Amiga emulators and be used as a media center to play movies and music or even be used as a simple PC with mouse and keyboard (because there are already apps for that on Android - and Google Play is not that needed if you can sideload them). And people knew all of it would be possible even if developers failed to notice OUYA.
It's got the fastest Tegra 3, not a slowish one. But we're not talking about Kickstarter - yes it was a good idea to talk about Android then. But now that they have their funding and are talking about it to mainstream consumers, they shouldn't be talking about Android, it's not really an Android device, it's a game console that happens to use Android as its back-end OS. Talking about Android now just causes confusion among consumers - it makes them only see the device as a cell phone they can hook up to their TV, and puts images of crappy cell phone games in their heads rather than full console games designed for the TV and game controllers.
It does the OUYA a disservice to say they are making any decisions based on it being a mobile device.
If you're thinking of APIs, you've missed the point entirely. Those who reap the benefits of fixed platforms are hardcore programmers. I wonder how many types this point must be repeated:
A console is not a smartphone!
A smartphone reaps the benefits of greater processing power instantly because you can run more and more apps concurrently, not to mention all the extra stuff they might introduce in newer iterations like 3d, NFC, 4G that might attract customers. In addition:
A console is not a PC either!
If you want to make a PC game that will impress everyone in graphics you can build your game based on a U$1500 powerhouse that it will likely be affordable a few years from now when you finish your game. On consoles, you have one fixed hardware and no real way of predicting how will future hardware be, since they're not freely configurable. All you can do is make the best out of what's available, therefore, with too frequent updates, you will be buying a console playing games designed for outdated hardware, defeating the whole point of yearly updates.
Also, who says Ouya has to stay put and watch? Over the time, consoles get price drops, storage upgrades, new accessories or even versions of the console with functionality outside gaming.
And big consoles are $300-$500 machines with $40-$60 games (not counting used or downloadable, of course) while Ouya is $100 with (probably) $2-$10 games. That means investing on a similarly priced console a player would need to put up the equivalent to 10-50 games as opposed to 5-12 games of major consoles. A competitor will have to be really good to convince people to buy them over just getting more Ouya games. "The competition is going to eat me!" is not how you run a business.
Basically, you should separate your rendering from your gameplay (this should already be obvious anyway, but still is worth saying). You should be able to gracefully degrade your rendering, possibly maintain different "quality levels" that you can switch between (Unity has this feature already built in)
So a game developed on OUYA 2 would have at least two quality levels: one designed to run on OUYA 2, and one designed to run on OUYA 1. This of course wouldn't impact gameplay at all, since as previously mentioned gameplay is completely separate from rendering.
Many PC games already have similar features, where it automatically detects the capabilities of your hardware and chooses what quality to run at.