Ouya



"The revolution will be televised."

The Ouya was an Android-based microconsole, famous for being financed by a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, and for crashing E3's parking lot on a guerrilla marketing campaign.

It became quite controversial, however, for a flawed launch: many backers did not receive their units in advance, early controllers had issues with lag (since patched) and buttons getting stuck (requires a very simple hardware mod), poor wireless performance (the fix can be a setting on your router), and some games had performance issues for not being properly optimized for the Tegra 3 chip.

As a gaming competitor to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, they failed. Miserably. TowerFall, the Ouya's most popular game at the time, had only sold 7,000 copies. As of July 2015, Razer has acquired the entire Ouya brand, discontinuing the console with the intent of migrating current Ouya customers to their personal Android game boxes. Several developers have complained that the buyout gave Ouya an excuse to nullify contracts that were intended to fund developers who provided games for the console.

All in all, the Ouya was a complete failure of a Kickstarter and of a console. Most of the Ouya-exclusive games have been ported to other systems anyway, and the whole saga is one big lesson for big-shots who believe their idea can compete with the industry giants. However, as it's dead-easy to port from Android (in fact, you can just install most Android .apks without modding), it does have a library of hundreds of titles — mostly mobile games, but also media players and emulators for several classic systems (most up to PS1 run well, but N64 is very hit-and-miss). So if you have $99 to burn and nothing to lose, go on and try it out.