The Brief, Sad Life of An Alternative Video Game Console

If there was ever a single thing to prove just how crazy and unfulfilling the promises made on Kickstarter can be, it's the Ouya. The adorable and beautifully designed device that runs on a version of Google's Android operating system wowed thousands upon thousands of gamers and tech enthusiasts with its vision of "a new kind of video game console" when it first appeared on the crowdfunding site in late 2012. It ended up raising more than $8.6 million—still one of the most successful campaigns in Kickstarter history.

It would be hard for anyone to live up to this amount of hype, but things went from bad to worse for the Ouya. Its creators wouldn't give many details about its financial performance, but there have been many reports suggesting the console hasn't sold very well. Except for the unimpeachable Super Smash Brothers-esque local multiplayer game TowerFall, the thing didn't offer much in the way of compelling content. Sony and Microsoft eventually released their new PlayStation and Xbox consoles, drowning out any possible voices of dissent. Even Nintendo, which hasn't been doing so well with its Wii U console, put out a handful of killer titles.

By late 2013, the prestigious gaming magazine Edge pronounced Ouya dead on arrival, suggesting that gamers and developers alike should look to Valve's "Steam Machine" prototypes for hope that someone will manage to put out a new piece of hardware that can legitimately hold its own against the big three console makers.

The Ouya isn't dead yet, exactly. Just last month, the company released a new "refined" version of the console. But where does it go from here? Speaking in an interview published today on The A List Daily, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said that the next step involves bringing the Ouya platform to other third-party devices.

"One thing you'll start to see is Ouya on other people's devices," Uhrman said in the interview. "We started with a $99 box, but we always wanted to create a console platform that can live on other people's devices. We just knew it was going to take us a little bit of time to get it ready. Now we think the software is good enough, it's ready to be embedded in other people's devices."

Uhrman presented this in a positive light, saying that the company's future plans came about as a result of meetings that took place earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The Ouya hardware isn't going away, she added in her interview. Rather, it's going to live on as a "reference device," while the entire conception of the product expands to define "an ecosystem that really can live on other people's devices."

The Ouya may very well move on to bigger and better things as "an ecosystem" than a single device. But I can't help seeing this as an admission of defeat, however tacit it may be. The whole reason the Ouya was created in the first place was to produce a more gaming-friendly face for Android on the hardware side. Google's operating system already provided an "ecosystem" that, along with Apple's iOS, has democratized game development in its own right.

There's a good reason that companies like Nintendo have remained so stubbornly opposed to severing the connection between their hardware and software. From a development perspective, it's much more challenging to optimize a piece of software for numerous different devices that all have unique characteristics. And on the business side, it tells analysts and investors that the first-party hardware isn't a strong enough product to sustain itself. That creates its own set of problems for an upstart company like Ouya since, as Uhrman explained in today's interview, tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google have all been reported to be tinkering with similar "microconsole"-type products.

Ouya's gradual decline has upset many gamers because, as the overwhelming support for the original Kickstarter showed, people have many legitimate grievances with the current market for video game consoles. For starters, the devices are incredibly expensive. New ones only come out every five to seven years, which forces many developers into arbitrary technological standards. And the licensing fees are so high that all but the richest publishers are edged out of the market, which creates an incredibly conservative creative climate.

I don't know what will happen to the Ouya in its post-hardware future. But even if it doesn't end up coming from the troubled gadget, hopefully gamers will keep looking for ways to escape the confines of the current technological leaders.