[Fish]

Originally Posted by Valiant

Odds are it will fail.

But even if they can only do a bit of what they are promising they will cripple ms and sony and bring the power back to the players.

Cripple MS and Sony? The companies that already have actual successful products in the market? LOL... how?

Do you think developers and game distributors are going to drop their successful profiting contracts they currently have to create games for an open source environment? Why on earth would they?

The only thing that Kickstarter has done with Ouya is take people's money and make promises. That's it. They have no distribution system in place, no manufacturing at all, and no existing customer base.

In many ways both Ouya and Kickstarter face a similar problem.

On a gaming console devoted to free, open-source games, one major problem will be ensuring that the best games float to the top rather than floundering amidst the vast majority of lousy titles.

The same problem exists at Kickstarter, where it’s often impossible to say which projects deserve funding, which are great ideas with inexperienced teams that have no way of following through, and which projects deserve your hard-earned cash. Democracy is lovely, but the traditional funding model has its benefits, too, including a much harder screening and sales pitch process carried out by people with real business experience.

Kickstarter for game development may represent a break from the traditional publisher-developer relationship, but it’s also ultimately the most risky form of pre-ordering a game imaginable. You’re basically paying for a game that doesn’t exist, or in Ouya’s case a gaming console that doesn’t exist.

Penny Arcade’s Ben Kuchera points out that “not only is there no finished hardware, no service at the moment, no controller, and no games—although we’re being asked to take their word that they can create each of those things in eight months—but focusing development costs on an incredibly risky platform with a small installed base and features that make piracy all but given makes no sense for most developers who release games you’d like to play. It’s an environment that not makes little sense for commercial development, in many ways it’s actively hostile to people hoping to create games for it.”

Industry analyst, Kevin Dent, took to Twitter to list reasons the Ouya may be too ambitious for its own good, listing everything from a lack of experience and content to the very real hurdles that will need to be crossed in order to sell the console in the first place. “ They have zero distribution into retail,” Dent writes, “do you think Amazon will be promoting this?”