Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Ouya Secures VC Funding, Slightly Delays Launch

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 9, 2013

Looks like Ouya is moving out of the wading pool into at least the shallow end of the grown-up pool.

Ouya Raises $15m in Venture Funding and Delays Launch

My grumbling joke is this might barely give them enough time to ship all the Kickstarter preorders before public launch now…

No, I haven’t gotten a single message about my Ouya. SOMEBODY has to have their machine ship last, I guess. Le sigh. Not like I’m anywhere near ready to start porting to it, yet, so I guess I’m about as good a “last person” as anyone. I’m still pretty excited about the box. You know, for a console. Me not being much of a console gamer and all.

Anyway, it’s only a three-week delay, and since they got off to a slow start. It turns out, SURPRISE, that actually building hardware and a system is only a small part of what’s necessary to ship a product on this scale – the logistical side is something that cannot be rushed that much – at least not without huge expense.

Anyway, this is… probably… pretty good news for the Ouya.  The story of consoles has always been, “Go big or go home.” The Ouya team has been trying to subvert that in a very indie way, but having enough money to go bigger doesn’t hurt. The big question – as always is the case with VCs – is how much of their own success and control did they give away?


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



  • Jon said,

    You can borrow my OUYA, until you get yours. I just know you’re overflowing with free time, and mine is sitting on a shelf looking pretty. I hooked it up and I like it in spite of it’s initial clunky interface, but I just won’t have time to fiddle for a few weeks.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I’m afraid that’s what’s gonna happen to mine two weeks after I get it, too, until I start porting my game over to it. 🙂

    I think I’ll be just fine, but I’ll give you a yell if I suddenly find I really need it. Mainly what I’ll want it for between now and the end of the year, I expect, will be just to get a feel for what sort of standards are evolving on the platform – what players expect.

  • Maklak said,

    I’ve seen an article somewhere that Ouya has about half as much processing power and RAM as top of the line smart-phones. There was also something about the controller being somewhat less convenient than expected. Besides, a few years ago this console might have been great, but there are going to be new models of X-box and Playstation soon, which will leave Ouya even more in the dust.

    As for logistics problem, I’ve heard a story that some bank upgraded to faster printers and decided to move all their correspondence with clients to just one of their buildings to save costs. As it turned out, the old printing system (or was it typewriters?) was so slow that they didn’t even account for putting the printouts in envelopes and stamping them. With their new system this turned out to be a bottleneck and they got a massive backlog. Seems like most software optimisations tend to work out that way too.

  • apocriva said,

    Yeah, I haven’t received notification either. 🙁 A coworker of mine was backer #200 or something like that, and he also hasn’t received notification!

    I figure it’s because we live in Atlantic Canada though. 🙂

  • Anon said,

    How about buying only what you can actually support – with your time (whether as game player or developer)?

    Geez, you people have way too much money…

  • Kyle Haight said,

    Any time you increase the efficiency of one stage of a productive process you face the possibility of a bottleneck developing at a different stage. An earlier bottleneck can starve the newly-efficient stage of needed inputs; a later bottleneck can prove unable to handle the increased output of the improved earlier stage.

    The history of the textile industry illustrates this process in a fascinating way. Improvements in one stage made improvements in subsequent stages both economically viable and necessary. People’s initial reaction to the cotton gin was “What are we going to do with all this cotton, we’ll never be able to spin and weave it!” The pre-gin production of cotton was insufficient to support automated spinners and looms; the post-gin production of cotton made such automation both possible and necessary.

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