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Originally Posted by flatout
You can;t take retail sale price to do that calculation... I say this as Kickstarter is basically a "give me a a free non-interest loan and I will re-pay you with a console I will make money on". Oh and know you helped us get our company going... but no profits or stock in the company will ever be yours for it. (this is how it fells to me anyways)
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I think this is just a difference in ideals as to why someone should back kickstarter. IMO you can look at it two ways
1. you're making a DONATION to the project, you think they have a good idea and you want to GIVE them money to help them out.
2. you're making a very very early pre-order where you're exchanging goods for money just like you would at GameStop or Amazon.com when you pre-order something.
In the case of the Ouya kickstarter I gave them money for a console a few controllers and I received a console and a few controllers a year later. I'm completely fine with this situation. If they, or anyone else makes millions over their goal, then I say "Good for them". As long as everyone received the goods they were promised I honestly don't see any problem with it.
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Originally Posted by flatout
I will say Ouya was a neat idea... but I also believe it is one that will die out very soon. Biggest issue (and why they require you card I assume) is pirating is rife on Android based devices... especially one that is made to be hacked. News on it almost ceased for awhile then they launched them and news perked for a second and now nothing again (but I don't look or listen for Ouya news).
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Well, like any console it only makes the news when something newsworthy happened. The only things newsworthy to happen since the retail launch are new games getting released and I'm seeing a steady stream of reviews and news about those games from Kotaku and other publications, which I consider typical of any console release.
As for the credit card and hacking I don't see the correlation. The fact that I entered my credit car wouldn't in any way shape or form prevent me from pirating on the Ouya. Honestly I think it's entirely based on the fact that they didn't write the actual purchase code into the console and instead offload that duty to the individual app developers. It was essentially lazyness on Ouya's part because it would have required more development to write an as-needed payment processing mechanism.
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Originally Posted by flatout
On the second point I have had Shadow Gun on my iPhone for almost 2 years now if I remember correctly (well over a year at least) and I would say you could call it "similar to Gears". But honestly it is a far cry from a console game at the end of the day. It is a very basic, yes it is pretty for a iphone/android game... when I first saw it I was pretty impressed. But now that there are handhelds like the Vita where they can actually put a console experience on there... a game with solid graphics, gameplay, (and here is the kicker) and length. IMO the only mobile games that have done this so far (with length) are the light on graphics RPGs (ther are a couple exceptions but they usually sacrifice in one way or another). Shadow Gun really is a rare entity on the mobile market, others on that graphics level are touch based games like Infinite Blade (which I disliked with a passion for some reason... was Fruit Ninja with pretty graphics).
When the mobile arena makes something comparable to Vita's Uncharted Golden Abyss then I will take it seriously in the console space.
Again this is just my opinion.
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I didn't mention it in my review but the version of ShadowGun on the Ouya includes an expansion that actually doubles the length of the game. I do agree though that the game is more of a graphics tech demo than genuine competitor in the game space. Even still, you can't expect a $5 game on a shoestring budget to compete against a $60 game with a multi-million dollar budget.
One of the things that surprised me most about the Ouya is that there are quite a number of "long" games available, meaning stuff that caters to playing more than a few minutes at a time. There are at least a dozen good narrative driven games that you can sit and play for hours at a time.
The biggest issue is that none of them are "exclusive". Though the reason for that is mostly because the Dev kits only went out earlier this year, you can't expect the next Skyrim to get developed inside of a couple months, and if any games like that were already underdevelopment for Android, I can't imagine any dev team would be willing to put all their effort into a completely unproven platform.
It's a little different when 3rd parties makes launch titles like that for Sony or MS because even though it's a new console, it's got a history and proven sales record, something that the Ouya doesn't have yet. It will be a while until the console "proves itself" enough for titles like that to find their way to it. Until then it's, at best going primarily to receive ports from iOS, XLBA, PSN and indie PC releases... but I guess that's EXACTLY what I expected out of it from the start, a consolidated platform for small and indie devs to use that let me enjoy their games on my TV instead of squinting at my phone or hunched over a keyboard in my office.
I also don't understand the absolute vitriol that a lot of hardcore gamers are throwing at the device... yeah they screwed up the launch and there are a lot of things that still need work but you'd swear the way people are attacking it that the Ouya team was somehow responsible for genocide or child slave labor or something.