The Ouya is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, June 25, 2023.
Like many failed console projects, the Ouya was both ahead of and behind the times.
What could an independent-focused console and development community create?
The Ouya was a $99 micro-console, built with Android architecture.
The pitch was in the low-price point and the fact that every console shipped was also a dev kit.
Anyone with some technical knowhow could begin developing games for the platform.
Indeed when the Ouya released, the reception was lukewarm.
The console flailed,was acquired by Razer, and died a slow death.
In some sense, Bogost was right.
The Ouya collapsed because its purpose had already been served before the point of sale.
Even watchingthe original Kickstarter video, the Ouya’s pitch is grand.
Industry disruption, mobile games on the big screen, enabling small developers to play with the big boys.
The future is here; it’s in this little box.
However, the Ouya’s strength was in its smallness.
Even the Ouya’s clearest success, the multiplayer fighter Towerfall, is an example of that smallness.
Towerfall’s strength is in frenzied obsession over a weekend and an occasional match over the following years.
It is small by definition, much like the Ouya itself.
Shortly after the console launched, the Ouya team opened a $1 million funding campaign.
Kickstarted indies could get their money matched dollar-for-dollar by Ouya in exchange for a six-month timed-exclusivity contract.
The policyreceived changes based on developer feedback.
It also showed the scale of Ouya’s ambitions.
Indie hits a la Super Meat Boy or even Towerfall were the name of the game.
The ever smaller games that crowded the corners of Ouya’s shop received less institutional support.
Kotzer wrote, “better anarchy than antiquity,” a warning that has become a prophecy.
Even more unfortunately, the Ouya was something of a closed ecosystem.
But it’s not as if nothing was lost or abandoned in its collapse.
Weirdly enough, it’s the personal computer that has taken the place the Ouya attempted to claim.
Portable PCs like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally are relatively easy to develop for.
More people than ever have a laptop or PC for school or work.
The cultural forces that shaped the Ouya, and those it helped shape, are still with us.
The Ouya got institutional support but was also, in theory, an independent console.
The Ouya could not.
The exact vision of a truly independent game console is further away than ever.
Even successors like the Playdate are more niche than the Ouya ever pitched itself to be.
Video games are an often unsustainable industry.
The Ouya’s central failure was perhaps its ambition, the scale it attempted to reach.
Its success was perhaps building a model for a different kind of gaming ecosystem.
The Ouya is far fromthe only small console with big dreams to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
But like all those other consoles, the Ouya points at alternate histories and alternate futures.
After all its history, it remains small, independent, and alive.
I only wish more people could participate in that.
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