Ouya Console Looks to Fill Gaming Market Niche

I’ve spent the past couple days trying out the Ouya console. While it is a legitimate gaming machine, it’s not a real threat to grab serious market share from any of the “Big Three” console makers.

At $99, the tiny box and downloadable games in the $20 range are priced low enough to attract casual and occasional gamers who dig playing time-wasters on their smartphones. And, because of the Ouya’s potential to emulate several other earlier-generation consoles, it’s also likely to appeal to nostalgic and retro-gamers.

Ouya was funded through a Kickstarter project. Reviews of an earlier, beta version weren’t flattering, so I was somewhat skeptical as I unpacked the console. The strip of red plastic film printed with the message “And so the revolution begins” atop the console did nothing to allay my journalistic skepticism.

There’s literally not much to Ouya, which was released on June 25. I’ve had coffee mugs bigger than the little round-edged cube, which features a single power-on button, but an array of ports on the back. The Ouya has an HDMI port that let me display at a full 1080 resolution on my home LED television, plus a LAN port, a power port and a USB port.

The Ouya started right up,

but required us to both establish a network connection and update the console’s Android-based firmware. That proved to be somewhat of a problem in my office. Our intranet firewall settings precluded our using a wired connection, so we quickly paired the console’s wireless controller to the Ouya and sought out one of several wireless networks we maintain. We connected to the first and began the system update, but the Ouya kept getting disconnected from wi-fi and cutting off the update. We then tried a second of the office wireless networks, with the same discouraging result.

At that point, we opted to tether the console to the wi-fi hotspot created by a colleague’s iPhone, and around a half-hour after getting started, we were updated and ready to go. It’s important to note that you’ll have to create an account for yourself on the Ouya, including providing your sign-in name, a password, an email and a credit card number. That raised some questions in my mind about the security of Ouya’s servers, ones that I will be posing in a telephone interview with CEO and founder Julie Uhrman on Tuesday.

I took the Ouya home and found it failed to stay connected to my wired LAN. I play Xbox Live just fine on that connection, so I don’t understand why the Ouya kept disconnecting and canceling game downloads or giving me error messages. That, by the way, is a common theme with the device, I’m finding. Often, after clicking on a button to start a game or perform another action, I’d get an error message on the screen. Clicking again would make the message disappear and the game open or the action continue. I noticed the machine worked fine when in constant use, but after I’d put down the controller for a minute or two, I’d tend to get the errors. Anyway, I was unable to tether the Ouya to my own iPhone’s hotspot, but it worked very well on my home wi-fi network.

The Ouya’s opening menu features several very clear and basic commands, like “play,” “manage” and “discover.” “Discover” takes you to the games menu, where you can find listings for around a couple hundred games in several easily navigable categories. All that I tried were free to download and play in a test or demo version, with a button to purchase the full game. The games, themselves, are a mixed bag, which I will get into later. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.