Update: Ouya's Kickstarter project reached its funding goal in less than eight hours, topping $1 million just after 5:15 p.m. ET. The speed of success recalled that of Double Fine's Kickstarter project from February.
A high-tech dream team is backing the new Ouya video game console, which started its fund-raising campaign today on Kickstarter.com.
About the size of a Rubik's cube, the Ouya set-top box is smaller than traditional systems, but the controller is comparable in size to current models. Features include buttons, two joysticks, a directional pad and a touch pad.
The company is looking to raise $950,000 on Kickstarter.com to fund fine-tuning and manufacturing of the system. (Here's our full story on Ouya.)
Award-winning industrial designer Yves Béhar, the founder of Fuseproject and chief creative officer at Jawbone where he designed the wireless Jambox speaker, is fashioning the console and controller. "He is the best designer outside of Apple," says Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman. "He really understands how to build something that is beautiful with high performance that is really affordable and attainable for everybody."
Other big names on board include Minecraft developer Markus "Notch" Persson, who plans to deliver an updated version of his hit game for the console. Indie game designer Adam Saltzman (Canabalt) is another supporter, as are former Microsoft Xbox executive Ed Fries, Peter Pham of incubator firm Science and longtime video game executive Brian Fargo, founder of InXile Entertainment and previously at Interplay, who is also an investor.
Other investors include Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman, Digg founder Jay Adelson, Flixster founder Joe Greenstein, Amol Sarva, founder of cloud software company Peek and Eric Hautemont, co-founder of board game publisher Days of Wonder.
"When I was telling people, 'I have this idea for an open console based on Android and all the games will be free to play so you don't have to spend $60 and get upset and the gamers could get into it for less than $100 bucks. What do you think about this?' the most common response was 'Yeah, wow. I'm surprised no one has done this already'," Uhrman says.
Game developers that Ouya has informed about the project include ThatGameCompany's Jenova Chen, who said, "I'm excited for Ouya! I am a firm believer that there is always room to challenge the status quo" in a testimonial quote on the Kickstarter page.
Development software is included on each console so that it is easy to create games on the open source Android system. "At the end of the day, we view this as the people's console," Uhrman says. "This is affordable for gamers at the less than $100 price point where all these games are free to play and for developers it is open so whatever they conceive they can finally get onto the television. ... What Kickstarter will allow us to do is get feedback and support early from gamers and developers and have them on board to support this."
0 comments:
Post a Comment