The wonderful news of this holiday season is that Microsoft launches its $499 Xbox One and Sony its $399 Playstation 4. It’s big news for gaming fans and especially for their wallets, because those prices don’t include any of the games.
But starting this week there is a new gaming console on the market, which is significantly more affordable if we compare with other hotly anticipated systems to Best Buy and Target shelves later this year.
It’s called Ouya (pronounced like Booya, without the B) and costs only $99! It’s shocking for other consoles in terms of price, performance and offerings.
Julie Uhrman is the founder of Ouya and told ABC News in an interview about Ouya like about a different type of game console. “We wanted to bring gaming back to the television by making it accessible to gamers,” he said, “All the games are free to try, and we allow any developer with the creativity and passion to build a game for the television to do so.”
What You Get for $99
If you know Xbox, Wii or Playstation boxes are the big and clunky. Compared to them, the Ouya is a small little box, no bigger than other small set top boxes, such as the Apple TV or the Roku. The little vase-shaped device houses the guts of a high-end tablet or smartphone, which has also an Nvidia quad-core processor and a Wi-Fi radio, does not need any CD or Blu-ray drive, because you can download the games right to the device.
You pay $99 and receive that box, an HDMI cord to hook it up to your TV and a single, AA-battery-powered controller. And if you add a little more – $49.95, you will receive also additional controllers.
The box has not only the same parts as your phone, but it also runs the same software as some of those phones. The menus and all the games have been written on top of Google’s Android platform but it’s the more interesting that the games and the Ouya software have been created for TVs.
In fact, the “O” in Ouya means “open.” And the “uya”- means “fun”. And of course, the fun comes with the games. On Tuesday more than 160 games were launched in the console and all of them are free to try. In fact you shouldn’t be gouged by paying $60 for a game if you don’t even know if you like it. Also it’s interesting that in fact the only requirement of game makers when submitting games to the Ouya store is that playing some part of it must be free.
A lot of game makers with experience making games for the PC and game consoles and game makers who have never made a game before have been attracted by this new console.
[box title=”About the Author:” color=”#616161″] Larry Heart is a technology blogger and stereoscopy geek. Currently he is working at www.mybookezz.org – free eBooks website. [/box]
