History of video games/Platforms/Ouya

Development
The "O" in the name Ouya was chosen to represent the openness of the device.

After asking for $950,000, in the span of about a month 63,000 backers raised 8.5 million dollars on the Ouya Kickstarter, with around 57,000 backers expecting to receive an Ouya console. Ouya consoles from the first production run have the names of backers who donated over $10,000 engraved on the side of the console.

Launch
""If we don't nail this, nothing else really matters.""

In December 2012, Ouya developer consoles started to be received by backers. At the time, the Ouya was the face of microconsoles.

The Ouya launch was notably not plagued by shortages. However, the launch was not without controversy. Notably, many backers did not actually receive their units by the time retail units were being shipped to storefronts due to a shipping error, incensing both backers and the company alike. Additionally, around launch there was some concern that the Ouya would be used to pirate games.

E3 2013 Incident
A notable incident occurred outside of E3 2013, when E3 and Ouya were in dispute over Ouya's booth location across the street from the event.

Market Performance
By July 2013 sales figures for games on Ouya were very poor, with several prominent games earning just a few hundred or thousand dollars.

In 2014 Ouya attempted to pivot to being a software platform.

In February of 2015 Ouya announced a deal with Alibaba to enter the Chinese market.

Legacy
Razer acquired the Ouya software in 2015 for their Forge TV console. There were some issues brought up by the merger regarding developer pay, though this was resolved within a day.

Online services for the Ouya were shut down on June 25th, 2019. Before the shutdown an effort was made by preservationists to conserve as much digital material as possible.

Technology
The Ouya is powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad core processor. By the time of launch, in part due to rapid improvements in mobile processors, this had become a component of middling performance.

The Ouya has one gigabyte of RAM and either 8 gigabytes of flash storage in the $99 model, and 16 gigabytes of flash storage in the $129 model.

Every Ouya console is also a development kit, and is designed to be easy to open up.

Notable games
"The interest in OUYA has inspired a lot of devs to reach out to us with existing content and new ideas and we are trying to get back to each and every one of them."

Towerfall
Originally an Ouya exclusive, Towerfall sold 7,000 copies on the Ouya, making it one of the system's most popular games.

Read more about TowerFall on Wikipedia.

Amazing Frog?
Amazing Frog? was a launch game for the Ouya and a former Ouya exclusive that was an early humor oriented physics sandbox game. Development of the game for the limited Ouya hardware was a challenge for the developers.

Soul Fjord
An Ouya exclusive rhythm game.

External Resources

 * Wayback Machine - Archived version of the official Ouya website (2013)
 * Video Game Console Library - Ouya page.