It’s time OUYA took a fresh look at their marketing strategy, and win back early adopters

The news today that OUYA have received additional funding and moved the date of their retail launch back by three weeks is a positive sign that the demand for the OUYA is strong and the console has the potential to go far.

It’s also indicative of just how far OUYA have come in such a short space of time. However, in blazing a trail, they’ve done a lot of throwing ideas around to see what sticks. That’s created a huge mess in it’s wake. Now is a good opportunity for them to clear things up and get back on message.

At the heart of the problem is the failure to pin down in consumer’s minds the value proposition the OUYA presents. People are quite rightly asking why they should buy the OUYA, and getting nothing back but a bunch of empty PR waffle about “great content” and “openness”.

Related, OUYA Inc, the company, gives off a very different image to the product they are selling. The console is billed as alternative and anti-establishment, while the company comes off as bland and corporate. Talking about Venture Capitalists to Forbes doesn’t fit with the actions of those hoping to spark a revolution in gaming

Another area OUYA would do well to rectify is in fixing the feedback loop with the community. It takes time for the ideas and criticisms voiced by the community become concrete actions or make their way into features and changes to the console itself. In the meantime, OUYA don’t appear to be listening, and that has been damaging. They need to make noises to indicate that they hear those concerns, and set expectations as to when they will be addressed.

If OUYA can make progress on these three points, they will be in a much better position to start winning back those early adopters who, after all, made it possible for OUYA to get this far in the first place

OUYA is the 3rd open platform (in addition to PC / mobile), but needs to better emphasise the opportunities it affords developers versus those other platforms

OUYA’s stated mission is to open up the last closed platform of gaming. But for developers who are already happily plying their trade on the other open platforms, PC and mobile, there needs to be something stronger than just “look! You can put your game on a TV now!” Something to motivate them to cross the divide and consider developing for the OUYA and TV environment.

The fact so many mobile games try (largely unsuccessfully) to adapt console favourite genres to use touch control schemes is testament to the underlying desire for what the OUYA, at its most basic level, provides. An open/easy way to make games for controllers. Indeed many of those developers already working on the OUYA are doing so for this very reason.

Going beyond the obvious, there are a myriad of answers to the question of what differentiates the OUYA from those other open platforms. The key is to understand the whole environment in which the OUYA is centred.

The lounge, with the OUYA-connected TV at it’s centre, is an inherently social environment, and unlike PC and mobile, content is consumed as a group activity. It is hard for more than an intimate couple to watch a movie together on a tablet, but with TV, many people can comfortably enjoy the same content.

More subtly, as a more personal space, within the home, where we invite friends and family to be together. Even a home PC is tinged with a sheen of the productive and professional world of work.

For game developers, that all translates to local multiplayer games, games that have an emphasis on getting close and personal with others, games where people want to more than just spectate, but feel the energy and atmosphere in the room where play is happening.

As well, the lounge is usually much more spacious and affords the players room to jump up and down and get active. This was something not lost on the makers of the Wii, which succeeded in part because it got people off their bums and playing games that required skills in more than just the thumbs and fingers.

The OUYA has the potential to take the innovations brought in with the Wii and take them to the next level, as indies and small developers have the opportunity to experiment with games that go beyond just what is on screen

There is plenty of scope for genuine innovation in the space in front of the TV. However, OUYA need to get better at making these arguments. If they can do that, the chances are raised of a game being developed that really shows of this potential and ignites people’s imaginations. In the mid to long term, that will pay dividends many times over for the platform.

There is no need to apologise for low quality games on the OUYA. It is part and parcel of an open system, and proof it is working

OUYA’s biggest threat comes from Valve, but OUYA has the ability to harm steambox sales through PC streaming apps

Valve’s upcoming Steambox console has the potential to really upset the hegemony of the big three console makers head on in a way that OUYA is only able to do indirectly. As champions of the PC platform, Steambox is also well positioned to bring their loyal customer base across to console. With many AAA games being released cross platform, including on PC via Steam and on other consoles, it should be relatively straight forward for developers to port their offerings across to Steambox.

It can also provide indie developers new opportunities to get their games onto the TV and likely with a considerably larger audience than OUYA will initially have. All that adds up to a serious threat to the OUYA.

Rewind back to summer 2012, and one of the early hopes for the OUYA came in the form of OnLive. The cloud gaming/streaming service allowed gamers to remotely play video games over the internet, with their games controller sending inputs to the central servers playing the game, and the corresponding audio and video stream being piped back to the gamer’s TV.

Unfortunately, as good as the idea was in principle, the business side of the equation was unable to make the concept work, resulting in eventual bankruptcy. Despite being bought out, a big question mark was left hovering over the future chances of OnLive coming to the OUYA.

While cloud gaming may have failed to take off (at least for the meantime), there exists a far simpler solution, and one that may yet put OUYA on a collision course with Steambox: Streaming games from PC to the TV via the OUYA.

Most PC gamers naturally opt for high end machines capable of both running the latest games and handling the processing needed to capture video output and stream it across the network. In turn, the OUYA is perfectly capable of receiving that stream and outputting it to the TV in full HD. With Steam’s Big Picture mode, designed for when PCs are directly plugged into the TV, it would be relatively easy to stream the OUYA controller commands back to the PC and have them mapped to whatever setup the player desired.

The network latency problems that come from cloud gaming would be much reduced, as people stream across their local network, rather than to a distant central server. In fact, such streaming apps already exist for PC to Android streaming, and it is not hard to imagine one retrofitted with the OUYA in mind could have a big impact.

I should point out that this is all hypothetical. The current PC/Android streaming apps are not ideal for use with games and the OUYA, and the Steambox has not even been seen by anyone outside of valve (much less launched to the general public). Never the less, these two new entrants to the console market may find themselves stepping on each other’s toes, and perhaps not entirely unintentionally

Killer apps are rarely identifiable ahead of time. OUYA needn’t be worried yet

A common criticism of the OUYA is that it lacks a killer app. Something that people can point to and say “This is reason alone to buy the console.” Of course it somewhat misses that most killer apps are only regarded as such in hindsight. It can often take years for such things to emerge and be truly appreciated for what they are.

That doesn’t mean OUYA should sit back and wait for such an app to naturally occur. Instead, OUYA should work to maximise the chances of it appearing and make every effort to create the sort of environment where a killer app can take hold.

In this regard, I think OUYA are making excellent progress. With an open platform and as many barriers to entry removed as possible, plus the shortened feedback loop between developers and OUYA, there are plenty of reasons to believe some of those developers working away on the OUYA right now could spawn a genuine hit or two.

I would still argue they need to do more to attract developers into the fold to begin with. High level press coverage isn’t nearly as effective as taking a small group of developers aside to pitch to them on a personal level, and I hope OUYA will do more of this in the future.

On the flip side, the unfortunate reality is that the number of consumers / paying customers using the platform also directly impacts on the ability to attract developer support, leading to a certain level of interdependency that is hard to escape (i.e. a chicken and egg scenario).

As well as creating the right environment, it is important to be able to identify early on those apps that have most potential to turn into that killer app. That way, when such an app does begin to really gain traction (and not before!) and start to cross the threshold between merely selling well to the existing customer base, and actively attracting people to the OUYA, the marketing machine can swing into action and accelerate that process

Where it gets harder is when the killer app is something more abstract than a single, easily packaged and identifiable product. To a certain extent, this is OUYA’s current problem, where the unique selling points are abstract things like hackability and potential for interesting indie titles. Those things are a tough sell to consumers raised on a high-octane diet of explosive action scenes and high visual impact imagery.

Games are a visual medium as much as anything else, and whilst gaming aficionados might complain about shallow gameplay mechanics and narrative behind the scene, the brightly painted cardboard cutouts at least do the job of getting people through the door.

With its explosive start and tight schedule, OUYA seems to be racing around at a million miles an hour, it may be once all the hype subsides after the June retail launch, that the OUYA can get really going on the long, slow burning path to true usefulness, and I think it is during this period that a killer app will emerge.

Friends like to play together, but reinventing the social network on OUYA is pointless

Relationships are all about communication, but that’s not easy when all you have to write with is a video games controller. It is one of the big downsides of the TV experience, and perhaps something this traditionally one-way medium will never be able to fully capture.

In the time since the outgoing generation of video games consoles first released, the world has gone online, and once there, it’s been getting social. Games too have gone online, with increasing movement towards multiplayer games and games as a service.

Consoles have evolved during that time as well, with increasing emphasis on social integration. So much so, that it has become one of the key selling points for Sony’s new PS4 console, with a “share” button built straight into the controller.

However, other social networks, those dedicated to the task like twitter and facebook, do a much better job of connecting people. In a world where ever more people have a smartphone or tablet to hand when sat at the TV, it is wasteful to try and replicate that experience on the TV simply for the sake of trying to tie people into a network they are not vested in.

So why have social features at all? Friends still want to play together and enjoy each others’ shared company within the virtual game environment. Whether competitive or cooperative play, multiplayer is just plain better when experiences can be built on over multiple gaming sessions with the same people, and that is impossible without being able to create and form relationships.

Rather than concentrate on how best to get around the problems that the TV/console controller setup introduces into this equation, it would be better to simply tap into the existing, real life relationships that already exist, and merely be an enabler of connections.

In practical terms, that means finding friends, finding what games they are playing and being able to jump into the action with them. No chat or private messages, no sharing this or linking that. In fact, sharing, especially trivial or things completely unrelated to the type of relationship between individuals can add to the general noise and devalue the channel of communication. If I add you on twitter because you’re an expert in your field, I don’t care what you had for breakfast this morning.

It’s also useful to consider what isn’t social, and that’s leaderboards and achievements. Both are inherently egotistical and about appealing to completionists and optimisers. It doesn’t really matter who the other people on the leaderboard are. The point is the leaderboard acts as a way to measure progress. Neither of these things are invalid or bad (unless implemented in such a way as to create noise), but should be treated separately from the social sphere.

Social networks that succeed do so because they are simple and intuitive and don’t come with some baroque feature set. If OUYA can follow this principle, it will tie in well with their clean, simple UI and design philosophy and save them a lot of wasted effort trying to get people talking when they just want to frag each other