The gaming revolution that wasn’t: Razer acquires console maker Ouya
The gaming revolution that wasn’t: Razer acquires console maker Ouya
Ouya got a lot of people excited when it raked in more than $8 million on Kickstarter in 2012. The premise was simple — make a small, inexpensive console running on Android with a game store populated with exclusive content and titles ported from Android. It sounds interesting, but Ouya hasn’t found success and today the company has been bought out by gaming accessory maker Razer.
A previously leaked memo from Ouya indicated it was in dire straights and looking for a buyout offer. The deal hasn’t been announced by either company yet, but acquisition management firm Mesa Global has confirmed it acted as financial advisor to Ouya during its sale to Razer. It’s listed right there on Mesa Global’s info page next to Google-Songza and other deals. Details are slim until one company or the other makes a statement, but it seems profoundly unlikely that Razer would choose to continue making the Ouya console.
The Ouya was reasonably cutting edge when it was announced in 2012. It packed a Tegra 3 ARM chip, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. That was basically the specsheet for Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which was released around that time. However, the Ouya didn’t come out until almost a year later. That’s not bad for a hardware Kickstarter (many take ages to deliver), but by then the hardware was already getting old. That same piece of hardware is still all Ouya has, and it’s still $99. It has not been selling well.
Ouya also had problems with game selection. There were only a few notable exclusive games for Ouya, and those eventually expanded elsewhere. Ouya’s storefront was completely outside the Google ecosystem. That meant even if you owned a game in the Play Store, you would have to buy it again fromOuya if you wanted to play it there. The upshot is that Ouya got the commission from all those sales rather than giving it away to Google. This might be what Razer is interested in.
Razer is mostly known for making gamepads, keyboards, mice, and other accessories. However, the company recently released a $99 Android TV box (Forge TV) with some legit gaming capabilities — that’s the same price as the ancient Ouya hardware, by the way. Android TV is part of the Google ecosystem, so all your content and games from the Play Store will transfer over (limited by compatibility). Razer might like to run its own store on the side with content it earns money from, not that such a thing is likely to be successful.
This feels like Razer simply swallowing up Ouya for its patents and back-end technology. It doesn’t really have much other value. The Ouya brand has been largely forgotten by gamers after it failed to bring about the gaming revolution that was promised. So the Ouya console is probably finished, but this is just the nail in the coffin — it was already dead.
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