Ouya

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ouya raised one million dollars in the first eight hours of its Kickstarter campaign. That is not a typo. Eight hours. The campaign's goal had been set at $950,000 for an entire month, and a small startup called Boxer8 blew past it before most of its backers had finished their morning coffee.

  At its heart, the Ouya was a tiny cube. Seventy-five millimeters on each side, running a version of Android, priced at $99. Its creator, Julie Uhrman, had a vision of a living room gaming device that anyone could develop for, that anyone could crack open with a standard screwdriver, and that would offer at least some form of free play for every single game on its platform. No gatekeepers. No licensing fees. Anyone who owned one was also, officially, a developer.

  The questions the Ouya raised were electric. Could a Kickstarter darling actually deliver hardware at scale? Could a $99 Android box carve out space in a market dominated by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo? And what happens when idealism about open platforms collides with the brutal economics of building and selling a games console? Those questions would be answered, decisively, over the course of the next few years.

• 2. Birth of a Cube

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  Julie Uhrman founded the project in 2012, operating out of Santa Monica, California under the company name Boxer8. She brought in Yves Behar to handle industrial design and Muffi Ghadiali as Vice President of Product Management to assemble the engineering team. The device they built together was visually distinct from anything else in the living room. A matte black cube, weighing 300 grams, meant to sit quietly next to a television.

  Inside the housing sat an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip paired with 1 gigabyte of DDR3 RAM and 8 gigabytes of internal storage. The processor ran four ARM Cortex-A9 cores at 1.7 gigahertz. The whole system drew just 4.5 watts during active gaming, dropping to a single watt on standby. These were not the numbers of a device trying to compete with the PlayStation or Xbox on raw power. They were the numbers of a device trying to compete on price and openness.

  The controller Uhrman's team designed carried dual analog sticks, a directional pad, four face buttons labeled O, U, Y, and A, back bumpers, triggers, and a single-touch touchpad at the center. Magnetically attached faceplates on each side concealed two AA batteries. The physical hardware made a clear statement about the Ouya's priorities. Modding and accessibility came first.

  Boxer8 was officially renamed Ouya Inc. on the 13th of August 2012, about a month after the Kickstarter campaign had already made the name famous.

• 3. The Kickstarter Phenomenon

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  On the 10th of July 2012, Ouya launched its public campaign on Kickstarter. Within the first 24 hours, the project attracted one backer every 5.59 seconds. That pace made it the quickest project in Kickstarter history to raise more than a million dollars, and it became the eighth project ever to cross that threshold.

  PC Magazine's Sascha Segan ran an opinion piece on the 12th of July 2012 titled "Why Kickstarter's Ouya Looks Like a Scam", which questioned whether any Kickstarter-backed hardware project could realistically deliver. Unreality Magazine pushed back, arguing that using multiple funding sources was simply standard business practice and carried no suggestion of fraud.

  The skepticism did nothing to slow the money coming in. Funding continued to climb as additional pledge tiers opened up. The campaign closed on the 9th of August with $8,596,475 raised, which represented 904 percent of the original goal. That made the Ouya the fifth-highest earning Kickstarter project in the website's history at the time.

  Early bird backers who pledged during the first wave paid $95 for a unit. Everyone else would later pay $99. Ouya units for Kickstarter funders started shipping on the 28th of March 2013, with a general public release on the 25th of June 2013 at the full retail price.

• 4. Open Platform, Mixed Reviews

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  Engadget reviewed the pre-release Kickstarter version of the Ouya on the 3rd of April 2013. The outlet praised the low cost and ease of hacking the device. It also found problems. Controller buttons stuck beneath the plating. The right analog stick snagged on the housing. There was a slight input lag between the controller and the console. Engadget's conclusion was that the controller was usable but far from great.

  The Verge identified similar controller construction issues and reported its own skepticism about game selection and the interface, calling the Ouya not a viable gaming platform or a good console or even a good TV interface. Despite that judgment, The Verge did acknowledge the device as "a device with lots of potential and few true limitations" in its openness and hackability.

  Tom's Hardware summarized early media reviews of the retail version as "lukewarm". Engadget's second look at the retail unit was more positive. The gamepad improvements were described as "huge", and the UI was noted as faster and cleaner. Digital Trends called the final retail unit "a device with a lot of potential built with love" and praised its design as a sleek and cool-looking cube, though it cautioned that the Ouya could not match the big three console makers on performance and would need to find its own niche.

  ExtremeTech reached a harder verdict. Beyond the controller and connectivity problems, the outlet found that games which ran smoothly on smartphones stuttered on the Ouya, and concluded that there simply were not enough worthwhile games on the platform. That last point would prove to be the most consequential criticism of all.

• 5. The Free the Games Fund Scandal

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  In July 2013, Ouya announced the "Free the Games Fund", a program to match developer Kickstarter campaigns dollar-for-dollar if they raised a minimum of $50,000 and agreed to keep the resulting game exclusive to the Ouya platform for six months. On paper, the fund was a direct expression of Ouya's stated values. In practice, it became a public relations disaster.

  Commentators scrutinizing the first two campaigns to qualify noticed that a small number of backers each pledged unusually high amounts. Many of those accounts had never backed a Kickstarter project before. Duplicate names appeared. Avatars matched those of celebrities. One campaign had a backer whose identity appeared to be linked to a missing person's case. The implication was that projects were artificially inflating their backing figures to qualify for Ouya's matching money.

  Kickstarter suspended funding for one of the qualifying games, Elementary My Dear Holmes, in September 2013. The developers of Gridiron Thunder, the other qualifying project, threatened legal action against a commenter on their Kickstarter page and also faced questions about whether they held any rights to official NFL branding, a license held at the time by Electronic Arts. A third project, Dungeons the Eye of Draconus, openly admitted that a relative of one of the developers had contributed substantial backing specifically to push the project over the qualification threshold. Ouya removed that project from the fund, and the developers pulled it from Kickstarter entirely.

  Sophie Houlden withdrew her game Rose and Time from the Ouya marketplace in protest. Matt Gilgenbach, seeking funding for Neverending Nightmares through the same program, said that abuse of the fund could destroy confidence in legitimate projects. After developers pressed her directly, Julie Uhrman acknowledged the criticism, quoting her own response: "Developers were telling us over and over, 'You're being too idealistic, and you're being too naive.' That was the part that personally took me a while to understand." Ouya revised the fund rules, added a dollar-per-backer limit, and both Rose and Time and Neverending Nightmares eventually returned to the program under the new terms.

  On the 18th of September 2013, Ouya also changed the exclusivity clause to permit developers to release their games on personal computer platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux during the six-month window.

• 6. Sales Collapse and Acquisition

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  Market analyst NPD Group described Ouya's first-month sales as "relatively light". Developers reported low game sales in early updates. By April 2014, Maddy Thorson disclosed that TowerFall, cited at the time as the Ouya's most popular game, had sold only 7,000 copies for the console. The Ouya sold roughly 200,000 units in total across its commercial life.

  In January 2015, Ouya received an investment of $10 million from Alibaba, with a possibility that Ouya technologies could be incorporated into Alibaba's own set-top box products. The capital injection did not change the trajectory. By April 2015, reports emerged that Ouya was attempting to sell the company after failing to renegotiate its debt.

  On the 27th of July 2015, Razer Inc. announced it had acquired Ouya's employees and its content library. The deal explicitly excluded Ouya's hardware assets. Razer directed existing Ouya owners to migrate to Razer's own Forge microconsole, and the Ouya brand name was to continue as a standalone publishing label for Android TV and Android-based consoles. Uhrman stepped down as CEO on that same day. The technical and developer relations teams from Ouya joined Razer to work on the Forge TV, which Razer itself discontinued in 2016.

  On the 21st of May 2019, Razer announced that all Ouya online accounts and services would be shut down on the 25th of June 2019. Most apps on the platform would become unusable, as they relied on user accounts to function. Razer suggested that users might be able to transfer some purchases to platforms such as Google Play, subject to developer and publisher agreement. With that shutdown, a device that had once attracted a backer every 5.59 seconds went permanently dark.