First came the Ouya Android microconsole. Then came Mad Catz’s M.O.J.O. Android microconsole. Today Mad Catz announces the M.O.J.O. microconsole will be playing host to Ouya content. I am so confused.
This is all due to Ouya’s recent decision to allow the Ouya experience to be embedded in other Android devices. They call it Ouya Anywhere. It basically takes the software that runs the Ouya — the storefront and such — and turns it into an app for other devices.
So the M.O.J.O., a more powerful Android microconsole (it runs on Tegra 4 to the Ouya’s Tegra 3 chip), now gives Android gamers access to all of the exclusive content the Ouya folks worked so hard to acquire. Plus all the existing Android games the Ouya couldn’t play.
The M.O.J.O. console does cost twice as much as Ouya’s physical presence, reduced today to $US199, but it’s far more powerful and comes with a much better controller.
Who needs an Ouya now? Nobody, really. This Ouya Anywhere initiative effectively kills any reason to buy the physical product.
But that’s OK. Ouya CEO and founder Julie Uhrman, via official press release, is just pleased to take the box out of the console experience.
“Up until now, the game console experience has been locked inside a box,” said Julie Uhrman, CEO and founder of OUYA. “Together with the hardware veterans at Mad Catz, we end that. Today’s announcement signifies the inception of a truly open platform where independent developers can bring their creations to the platforms where gamers actually play: everywhere.”
All of the enthusiasm that made the Ouya such a ridiculous success on Kickstarter has come to this. They made a console, and then ditched it to become a platform. Is this making sense to anyone else?
Comments
24 responses to “There’s Pretty Much No Reason To Buy An Ouya Anymore”
M.O.J.O master race.
Did anyone at all who backed the OUYA actually want it to play games on? Every single time I saw it mentioned the words “tiny media PC” were in the same post
for me: xbmc and n64 roms… but mainly xbmc
Can you explain? Does it play xbmc well? I’m currently using a raspberry pi to run xbmc. Its amazing but just too under powered for it to work perfectly. Lots of crashes etc.
I run xmbc on both ouya and a ras pi. It is a million times better on the ouya.
Performance-wise it’s excellent. Only thing I’ve noticed is it’s slower to do library updates than my PC, otherwise playback and menus are flawless.
That being said it still doesn’t support HDMI audio passthrough, and the audio support has been gimped in the official release (and hasn’t been fixed since it happened about 5 months ago).
Net result is that I’m still looking for something better (Intel NUC is looking promising)
I have the first generation i3 Intel Nuc and extremely happy, overkill if just for XBMC but it handles a large library no issues, it is extremely small and quiet.
hmmm media players…why do they have to be so hard to find. there is always something that’s not right. The perfect one just doesn’t exist.
I had no dramas with xbmc, what version did you run?
I just run raspbmc off a SD card
Ahh k, yeah i was running that. Did 1080p mkv files etc no dramas, slight delay when going from menu to menu, but still quicker than say a wd media player is
yeah i mean the actual playback was perfect. It never lagged even when playing over wireless connection. It was just the flicking between the hundreds of movies and the hundreds of tv shows i have. it really really does lag
Youll get that on wireless, my ps3 does the same. It isnt as bad if you use ethernet.
I was like, ‘i’ll think about buying games for it’ and installed Plex. Yet to actually open a game on it yet.
Downside is there’s no cable for the controller. Batteries suck with it.
The most surprising part of this article, is that anyone still cares about the Ouya.
I had honestly forgotten it even existed until I saw this headline.
I was a backer for this and I’m still happy with my purchase. I wanted a media device that I could run Plex on and thats exactly what I got. The games thing was a bonus. I’ve downloaded a few games on it but haven’t spent any money on them. Also Ive been able to deploy stuff that I knocked up in Unity on it.
What ouya? You mean my Android phone? 😛
I really like the controller, reminds me of the Xbox 360 controller, i’d buy it if comes with halo 5.
If you own a high end android phone just get a hdmi cable and a bluetooth gamepad, tadaa you have an android console, that’s also portable if need be.
It makes sense. They are a established company whose signature product failed to become a hit and now threatens to be a burden on the company’s profit rather than an asset. It’s called “cutting your loses”. It is a bit sad, but a much better move than investing huge amounts of money in upgrades/gimmicks/advertising on a product that lacks the goodwill to actually have the chance to recover, or just slowly vanish from the public’s memory until the day they just have to close their doors.
This sounds like they’re trying to keep the dream alive but I dont think its gonna work. I think the Ouya was pretty much DOA. Sad but true… Everyone already has Android on their phones and tablets, a console which does the exact same thing doesnt bring anything new to the table.
Julie’s statements seem to make it sound pretty much like they had no real long term plan with the OUYA. The OUYA as a cheap alternative to games consoles was always going to be an incredibly hard sell and their attitude of “Now we’ve essentially dropped the console, we can focus on what we really meant to do” shows they’re struggling to keep the brand alive.
They also have some very tough competition given the number of alternate stores out there already that aren’t that popular compared to the Play store and the fact that developers still have to code for the OUYA platform. It’s probably not much effort to port an existing Android game to an OUYA enabled one but is there enough interest in the OUYA “platform” to even justify the effort?
Since its running the tegra 4, If nvidia decided to be less stingy with their in home streaming software that they use on the shield (also running tegra 4) i would be all over that day 1.