OUYA Dev Consoles Ship December 28
Developers will get special OUYA consoles starting December 28.
Seems like it's been a while since we've heard any news about the Android-based OUYA game console. The latest update on the Kickstarter page, posted on Friday, reveals that hardware units for developers will begin to ship on December 28. These will be early versions of the controller and console combo designed for testing Android games on the OUYA platform.
"When the final consoles ship, EVERY OUYA will be a dev console," the update reads. "We told you that already. What we didn’t tell you was that the advance dev consoles you ordered are pretty special – you’ll know what I mean when you open yours. They’re rare drops."
"The dev consoles aren’t cheap for us to make. And we heard from many of you during the Kickstarter campaign that you simply couldn’t afford one," the update adds. "We wish we could just give them away, and we decided for a few of you – we’d do just that!"
Developers will have to work for the freebies according to the team, and are directed to the Dev Console Giveaway page which provides more details.
In addition to the developer consoles, the team is also working on the OUYA Development Kit (ODK) that will be available to download once the hardware begins to ship in late December. The software will be provided via a web portal to all developers – not just those who receive testing units. This portal will eventually open up to allow developers to upload their games, and to receive help from the OUYA forums.
"While jamming on the ODK, we’ve also had a team focused on the user interface," the update states. "This involves optimizing Android Jelly Bean to play games on a big screen and spending time understanding the best ways gamers can search for and discover new games. It’s still in development, but it looks great, and the advance dev consoles include a sneak peek."
The first batch of $99 OUYA consoles for those who made a purchase without developer credentials is slated to ship sometime in March 2013. The Kickstarter project originally launched during the summer and reeled in 63,416 backers pledging $8,596,474 USD.
Why power a gaming console with a chip that can barely even handle 720p resolution thanks to its abysmal memory bandwidth? not to mention the crappy GPU that is based on ancient PC tech scaled down to work on mobile.
IMO they should've went with at least Snapdragon S4 Pro.
But I guess with clever nvidia marketing you can fool most people.
I have to agree, while I love my Nexus 7, my Samsung GS3 is a lot faster overall with the Snapdragon Dual Core and 2GB of RAM. However, the games on the Nexus 7 still run great and look Playstation 2.5 quality.
Those criticizing its its specs need to realize they had to bundle the console and controller in a certain price point, the Tegra 3 is some incredibly cheap and small silicon. I'm not sure about the S4 Pro but the T3 is far smaller and thus cheaper than most current gen mobile SoCs. And 28nm production still hasn't ramped up as much, so there's another ding for going with another chip.
I hope something comes of this, an open gaming console seems like a very interesting idea.
Snapdragon S4 Pro was not anywhere near being out when this device was conceived and manufacturing plans started. You can't design a device around a chip that isnt out, then expect to just put it in when the chip is released. Why do you think consoles are always behind PCs? There is a development cycle...
and like some others pointed out, this was a kickstarter project that was started pretty much when tegra 3 was considered great and is to this day considered cheap. you cant just promise one thing in a kickstarter and end up changing plans. and you kind of wrong about devs not finding anything productive in it. devs dont look to make games with the best there is, they look to make games with the standard, kind of like consoles. if you release a console that at least around 60k people will have on release and thousands more will buy on day one, you can be sure devs will make games based on this console. also should notice that some of the best games on android are made in 2d with sprites and dont need crazy hardware to run and the most advanced games on android run well on tegra 3.
They talk about unchaining devs, but if I want to dabble with game development, I'd use my PC. It's simply the best development platform, period. There's still a big PC market out there, and I could always do a phone/tablet port, afterwards.
It's a proof of concept at best. It lacks any real explanation of a path forward. There are actual physical limitations to the hardware platform that no amount of code optimization will help with. It's not like this is an analog to contemporary big-name consoles like PS3 and XBOX. PS3 and XBOX360 can edge out performance of games even until now because they used PC-based components with tons of headroom. That's not the case for Tegra3. No amount of working closely with nVidia will change that. Check out some of the in-depth analyses of "Tegra3 optimized" games. Nearly all of the graphical additives over the older Tegra2 and previous versions of the game take a toll on the framerate performance, with dips quite low at many times. This is because of the bandwidth limitation of Tegra3. Where the R520-based Xenos chip that was used in the Xbox360 has so much headroom for graphical capabilities and performance over the PC-equivalent X1800 at the time, the Tegra3 platform lacks this. Even with already-optimized code, it shows obvious performance hits. The PowerVR chipset used in the newer iPads has more throughput capabilities than Tegra3. The Tegra platform in general has grown into an overhyped beast--more when it comes to tablets, because OS's and apps have still not been coded to properly take advantage of the system resources. But graphically, the Tegra3 platform faces so many challenges that I would be surprised if an Ouya platform gains any real amount of traction if based on it.
The world has already ended, but no one has noticed it.