Hi, all!
March is almost here, and so the long awaited launch date is looming behind the corner. Does anyone know what this is more specifically?
Our studio is bringing two original games to Ouya, and we try to hit the launch. Still a way to go, and even an estimate about the launching schedule would do good. Couple of follow-ups:
1) How long does the submission process approximately take?
2) How soon you are able to submit updates, and do they take the same amount of time to be reviewed?
bests,
Markus
COO / Kanki Bros
kanki
Posts: 62Member
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I think it's early to be asking how long submissions or reviews take, considering they've never done any submissions or reviews yet :) And have no idea how many people are going to be submitting games for launch. If they get, say, 15 games to review at once, the process will be fast. If they get 150 at once, it'll be long. Also depends on how many people they hire to do the reviewing, and what hours those people end up working (if only business hours on weekdays, for example, expect longer review times at the beginning of the week as they will have gathered extra apps to review over the weekend).
Based on what's been submitted to the test store so far, I'd guess that it won't be bad at all for launch, but who knows, there could be few dozen people who will suddenly appear with Android ports or something the moment they start accepting final submissions. There are something like 1200 dev kits out in the wild, that *could* make for a rather hectic launch (and that's assuming there aren't any foolish people planning to release their game without testing it on hardware).
But I'm sure I won't be the only one who leaves it to the last minute, and a lot of devs (myself included) could end up being left in the queue while consoles are busy turning up at people's front doors
The other real challenge will be when all those kickstarter backers suddenly get their consoles and want to start uploading anything and everything onto the store. I think that's when we'll start seeing the quality go off the deep end, and just have to hope the stuff OUYA have done for measuring engagement really does what it is supposed to do
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My point was it is literally impossible to answer how long submissions or views take if they haven't started revewing games yet. Thus it's early. It most likely only takes at most a half hour to review an average game, since they aren't going to be super anal about it like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, but if they have to review 800 games then it'll take quite a bit longer for a game to get through submission than if they have to review 8 games so how could anyone answer that?. Even after launch, it could be hard to estimate - sometimes Apple will take two weeks because they got a lot of games in, sometimes it only takes like 3 days.
And it's actually a little over 5 weeks at the latest, it's supposed to ship in March not arrive in March. Personally I'm assuming it'll ship very late in March like the dev kits did with the first units shipping December 28th.
Note that even Nintendo doesn't get their software all worked out until the last minute. The Wii had a day zero firmware update in Japan, the Wii U didn't have any online at all until its world-wide day-zero firmware update (and some launch features got delayed), the 3DS didn't get its online store until 3 months after launch.
Not saying at all that this is how things should be or making excuses for OUYA or anything, just making an observation that this is actually normal for the gaming industry. System launches are almost always rushed affairs for whatever reason.