On the 10th of July 2012, a project called Ouya shattered the Kickstarter record for the fastest project to raise one million dollars, achieving the feat in just eight hours. This was not a charity drive or a creative film project, but a video game console designed to cost only ninety-nine dollars. Julie Uhrman, the founder of the company, had pitched a vision to democratize game development by creating an open platform where any developer could publish a game without paying licensing fees. The campaign, which officially launched on the 3rd of July 2012, raised a staggering 8,596,475 dollars by the 9th of August 2013, making it the fifth-highest earning project in the history of the crowdfunding site at that time. The device itself was a small cube, roughly the size of a deck of cards, housing an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip and running a modified version of Android Jelly Bean. It was designed to be opened with a standard screwdriver, inviting users to modify the hardware and create their own add-ons. The initial promise was that this small box would revolutionize the gaming industry by removing the gatekeepers of traditional console manufacturing.
The Hardware And The Controller
The physical console featured a cube design measuring 75 by 75 by 82 millimeters and weighed just enough to be unobtrusive on a television stand. Inside the casing sat an ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at 1.7 gigahertz and 1 gigabyte of DDR3-1600 SDRAM, which was shared between the CPU and the GPU. The system supported 1080p video output via HDMI 1.4 and included 8 gigabytes of internal flash memory that could be expanded through a USB port. The accompanying controller was a unique piece of hardware with face buttons labeled O, U, Y, and A, replacing the traditional A, B, X, Y layout found on other consoles. It featured a single-touch touchpad in the center and magnetically attached faceplates that enclosed two AA batteries on each side. Early reviews from April 2013 noted significant issues with the controller, including buttons getting stuck beneath the plating and the right analog stick snagging on the internal components. Despite these flaws, the console was designed to be easily moddable, allowing owners to become developers without needing to pay any licensing fees to the company.The Free The Games Fund
In July 2013, Ouya introduced the Free the Games Fund, a program designed to support developers making games exclusively for their system. The company promised to match any Kickstarter campaign dollar-for-dollar if a minimum of 50,000 dollars was raised, provided the game remained exclusive to the Ouya platform for six months. This initiative quickly became mired in controversy as commentators noticed patterns of fraud, including duplicate names and avatars that included those of celebrities, and even a backer whose identity appeared to be taken from a missing person's case. The developers of the game Gridiron Thunder threatened litigation against a commenter on the Kickstarter page, while another project, Dungeons the Eye of Draconus, was removed from the fund after it was revealed that a relative of one developer had provided substantial additional backing to qualify for the money. Despite the scandal, Julie Uhrman eventually accepted criticism from developers who called the program naive, leading to rule changes that added a dollar-per-backer limit and allowed developers to release software on personal computer systems during the exclusivity period.