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The Good And Bad Of The Ouya System
Learn whether or not your Ouya purchase will be worthwhile directly from those who know the system best: game developers.
Ouya development kits started shipping to developers about a month ago, and now that these programmers have had a bit of time to play around with the system, what do they think? Good question. We're not the only one who's asked.
Engadget posed this to a group of game developer, and here's what they said about the Kickstarter funded console.
"The OUYA is definitely an exciting piece of hardware as it's positively silly how quickly you can get something running on it," said Nathan Fouts of Mommy's Best Games, creators of 2D gems Shoot1UP and Explosionade. "This may be obvious for all Android mobile developers, but coming from a console background, I was really impressed with the accessibility and open aspects of the platform. In fact, the openness of the OUYA is definitely one of its strongest traits. From its ease of development, to how open the marketplace is supposed to be, I think it's a real delight. Getting Serious Sam Double D XXL through XBLA's Certification was brutal! I'm happy to release the game there, but it's a nice break to have fewer restrictions."
While most of the developers have good things to say about the system, many of them have some reservations as well.
Jerrod Putman from Tiny Tim Games, creators of Sheepstacker and Word Monkey said, "The disadvantage of the hardware is the passage of time. The Tegra 3 chipset inside is powerful enough to push a lot of polys around and it can even handle a fair amount of pixel shaders, but there are already mobile chipsets being introduced that will surpass it easily. But this is just par for the course for consoles, and over time developers should be able to push the boundaries of what the chip is able to do."
There you have it. Some good. Some bad. But only time will tell if the good outweighs the bad and the Ouya proves successful.
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