Ouya and Kickstarter; Will the Fledgling Console's Release Change Game Development? [Opinion]

Kickstarter has become the newest way for consumers to directly fund artists, musicians, and other creative projects, including video games. Each day we hear about some new project a developer has put online to try and raise funds to make their dream a reality. While publishers like EA and Activision are not going away anytime soon, Kickstarter has opened up a whole new way for games to get funded and released. As companies look towards a future where digital distribution reigns, Kickstarter campaigns may allow studios to gauge audience interest and bring the next big thing to gamers. This can be seen with the successful Kickstarter campaign of the OUYA console.

OUYA still seems like somewhat of a far-fetched idea. It promises investors in the project a home console that requires developers to make their game free-to-play at some level, can be modified and tinkered with without voiding the warranty, and runs on the Android 4.1 operating system...all for a price of $99. But when the company brought their ideas to Kickstarter, the response was staggering. OUYA shattered many of the records for Kickstarter campaigns at the time. This included the fastest to get to $1 million (until the Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter beat it out recently), biggest single day in the website's history (before again being beaten by Veronica Mars) and is currently the second most successful campaign in the website's history, with over $8 million pledged to the system to date and over 60,000 backers. In the first 24 hours of launch, OUYA picked up a new backer on average every five or six seconds.

Several games have been funded on the site based on the creators themselves. For example, Ultima Online creator Richard Garriot hit his million dollar goal for his new game, Shroud of the Avatar, in under ten days. Double Fine Adventure was able to raise $1 million on Kickstarter as well, based again on founder Tim Schafer's cult status among gamers. Now, developers with outstanding reputations can look outside publishers to get funding for whatever project they come up with next.

Clearly, in today's market there is demand for crowd funded video games, but there is still one big problem: we have yet to see successful video games or consoles that has come from such a background. While companies like OUYA and Double Fine get millions of dollars from eager fans wanting to see their dollars turned into the product they were hoping for, at this point all they are doing is investing in promises. We do not know whether OUYA will take off like Steam or flop utterly once backers get their actual hands on the console. We assume that just because we have given money to people we will receive everything that we were promised.

In an industry where giants like EA can botch the release of SimCity so spectacularly, anything can happen. Do I think something similar will happen to OUYA? Probably not, as OUYA has several high profile developers making games for the system, such as Square Enix and NAMCO BANDAI. The system's hardware is by NVIDIA, one of the premiere hardware companies in the world.The system will also allow owners to mod the machine however they want, and design games right on the system. Having a required free-to-play or free-to-try model means gamers looking to save $60 on a new game could turn to OUYA. These are all recipes for success, especially when you do not have the resources of Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony. But it is hard to get so invested in something that requires so much faith from backers, especially as gamers gear up for the next-gen systems slated to come out this year. OUYA can stand out if given the opportunity, but Kickstater has not yet proven to be the path to mainstream success. Again, so much is up in the air concerning the success of crowdfunded projects beyond the actual pledging phase that we will have to wait to see how it all comes together.

Kickstarter is the one of the many ways that game development has become much more open during this generation of consoles. With so many avenues for gamers to find and acquire games, developers are finding new ways to make their products. Kickstarter offers possibly the most straightforward capitalist way for consumers to use their power. By buying into the products they want to be made, they vote with their wallets directly to the manufacturer. We shall see if Kickstarter starts the new revolution in the video game industry, or becomes a flash in the pan. Certainly, OUYA will play a big part of which way crowdfunding is remembered by gamers in the future.