One of the biggest Kickstarter successes of all time, the OUYA game console, is going to begin shipping to developers this month.
It’s very easy to forget that OUYA is promising to be another home console. You can’t really count this one as competition to the Wii U, Xbox 720, or PlayStation 4 – or even the current generation of consoles, for that matter – but the concept of casual games in front of your television is something a lot of people are getting behind. We know because the OUYA Kickstarter page ended up with well over 60,000 backers and got funded by a factor of almost ten times their asking amount.
They’re cutting it down to the wire, but it looks as if a 2012 delivery is not entirely out of the question for those who backed the Kickstarter project in order to preorder their OUYA consoles. On the company’s developer blog, they reaffirm their commitment to a 2012 ship date:
To the hundreds of developers who backed us through Kickstarter to get their hands on our advance dev consoles: Mark your calendars! On December 28, they leave the factory and should arrive within a couple of days (we’ve heard that Turkey and Russia might take a bit longer). Yes, we are shipping these to you on time, as promised.
This is great news for anyone who celebrates Orthodox Christmas in early-January, but just barely misses the holiday mark. Regardless, the people who bought OUYA are probably not giving it as a gift due to the nature of Kickstarter, and the lack of guarantee that the product would ever even ship.
For $99, the diminutive console comes with a controller and will be compatible with games written for Android and tested for compliance on the OUYA platform. All games are free to play, although you have to pay for full versions of some titles if the developer or publisher chooses to charge for it.
At this point, the list of anticipated games is pretty thin, according to Wikipedia. With that said, this is not a console that will garner a lot of attention from big players like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts unless it really gains some traction in the coming months. Once that happens, however, who knows how much this thing could take off.
The first round of consoles is actually developer units, while the full retail package will launch in March or April 2013, assuming there are no hiccups along the way. However, with Android an open platform, every OUYA console will end up as a dev console.
Did you order an OUYA? Are you excited to start Android gaming on your TV? Waiting for Apple’s game console or Apple TV update to allow games? Or are you just enjoying connecting your iPad to the TV directly and playing from there? Sound off in the comments and let us know, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!