What Do Android Consoles Really Have to Offer?

The market is readying itself to be flooded with the releases of Android-powered consoles in the next three months. The Ouya and Shield are out but the MOJO, GamePop, Gamestick and rumored consoles from Google and Amazon are on the way. Are they all the same? What does this new category of home consoles really have to offer?

Unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, to be released later this year, most of these Android consoles are targeting a completely different market. Hardcore gamers are going to spend money for graphics, features, and exclusive games that big name consoles have to offer. But what if you don’t want to spend a fortune just to play some games on your TV? Android consoles have a lower cost and stream many classic games and apps that consumers already know they like. The exception being Nvidia’s Shield, which may be powered by the Android operating system, but is in an altogether different category with its Tegra 4 chipset allowing it to play and stream PC games.

It is possible to side step Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo altogether and grab a home-console for under $100 while being something more than we can play on our phones? We look at what android-powered consoles really have to offer and if they’re right for you.

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The current generation of Android-powered micro-consoles may have started with the Ouya, but if we take a step back to 2009 we can see the origins of the modern system. The Evo systems from a company called Envizions had been trying to produce a low cost gaming micro-PC for your TV for years. They were able to create and sell the EVO Smart Console that played Amiga based and mostly retro games for $250, but ultimately were unsuccessful in getting their later systems off the ground. Limited games and a high price point, nearly $500, killed the concept.

Companies that directly competed with the high graphic capabilities of the Xbox and PlayStation systems couldn’t do what Microsoft and Sony had done and sell their hardware at a loss, instead companies like Envizions priced themselves right out of the market.

In 2012 Julie Uhrman, a veteran of the game industry who worked for companies like IGN and Vivendi Universal, founded Ouya. Using Kickstarter, she and her partners were able to raise $950,000 in just 8 hours promising an Android-Powered, $99 dollar console that allowed full customization, modification and total developer support. Thus creating an undeniable market that every other hardware and app developer had to take notice of.

Ouya’s Kickstater unleashed a beast, other companies rushed to create their own concepts, Gamestick, MOJO, Gamepop and unannounced concepts from Amazon and Google undoubtedly all got their start in the wake of the money being thrown at the Ouya concept.

Ouya has only been on the mass market since June but already some questions have arisen to its future. Not the least of which being that only 27 percent of Ouya users had purchased any games from its streaming library. All games on the system have some element of free-to-play or demo versions so it’s possible that users are still working their way through, but not exactly exciting news to the ears of developers.

Game availability doesn’t seem to be an issue, there are tons of games available for the system. Quality seems to be the crux. The fact is that making great games and getting a profit out of it are often not as closely related as we might think.

In the current generation of android games it’s hard to see how a small company like Ouya can develop the resources to convince developers to exclusive deals that would be profitable for both.

Lorne Lanning, the creator of the Oddworld series summed up this idea: "I think open source is the future, but I'm not sure Ouya will be the one to take it," he goes on to explain that even though Ouya earned a mint on Kickstarter it’s nothing compared to what companies like Microsoft and Sony have done. "Ouya has a lack of funding and it is hard to make a major hardware play with so little money."

Price may have been the biggest push for getting this Android console craze started. In the middle of a slack development period for major consoles and their $300-500 dollar price tags, the prospect of playing the rapidly growing, and rapidly improving games that were available on your phone, and bringing them to the living room for $99 dollars seemed like a great deal.

Games though run as high as $15, in fact the best seller on Ouya as of now is TowerFall which is free to demo, as Ouya policy states, but $15 to unlock the game. It’s also an exclusive to Ouya, which means it can only be played at the platform, but its exclusivity only lasts for six months. After which it’s rumored that developers will bring their former-exclusives to other platforms, including PC – with more features – not available to original purchasers.

TowerFall is the top seller on Ouya but only sold around two thousand copies, not bad for a single developer, crowd-funded game but that’s extremely low by any other standards.

With each new Android Micro-console released we can’t help but think back to the wave of Plug-n-play TV ready retro game systems. Emulators held within controllers or small joystick boxes that let gamers play some or all Atari or Nintendo games on the cheap.

At least the Micro-consoles feel like this, but they offer much more of a robust experience. Even if you do not play games on your console it can be used for lots of other applications. Applications like Netflix, streaming shows, and television are all possibilities. Ouya, for instance has partnered with Twitch.tv, iheartradio, TuneIn, Plex and Flixter to name a few.

So it’s possible that profitability could side step games all together and be a media platform first and gaming platform second. This seems to be the direction of other consoles like the Xbox One which aims to be an everything machine; all inclusive media manager.

One undeniable component about Micro-consoles is their economy of power. Thanks largely to miniaturization and power upgrades from Nvidia, Ouya and its competitors will be sporting a new generation of Tegra processors. The Ouya has a Tegra 3 Quad-Core processor comparable to other high-end Android tablets. The Asus Transformer tablet actually has very similar specs to the Ouya but retails at over $600 while Ouya stays at $99.

Competitors, like Nvidia’s own Shield device, which is not a micro-console per say, but a bridge between handheld games and console devices, sports the Tegra 4 chipset but also carries a hefty starting price $299.

One of the biggest benefits of Google’s Android operating system is its open coding. The Ouya realized this and made its entire platform open to developers. Everyone who owns one is equipped to program, debug, and run apps and games on the system. This kind of open format may give the system and its like-minded competitors far more longevity that we can currently imagine.

Developer reviews seem mixed, many love the support the open source idea of the systems but perhaps had inflated expectations around what Ouya's launch would actually mean. Most developers site the negatives as being low or slow sales yet many of these companies are Indie or one-person game houses, so the biggest plus is that they get exposure for their company.

If developers love on feature universally, it’s that it is easy to port their game to Android and Ouya and this makes it more likely that more games will flow to the market.

When listening to the public relations of any of the Android systems there is one common theme: what it could be. It’s true that given the right games and the correct marketing it could blow open the console market this holiday season. But it won’t. Not yet, at least.

The future of micro-consoles may lie in the hands of streaming services. Valve is beta testing its streaming service, Steam, on Nvidia’s Shield. It’s possible that the integration of Steam and low cost and accessible hardware could actually bring serious AAA titles to gamers and ultimately offer Android consoles a killer app. But without big open game markets these companies are left to squabble over exclusives to games that, unfortunately, don’t appear to making very much money.

If the hapless trajectory of Nintendo Wii U has taught us anything, it’s that no matter how good your hardware is you must have the support and trust of developers and publishers to provide the games that sell your system.

Besides exclusives to Ouya, why is any micro-console better or different from using my android-powered phone? While it’s pretty easy to set up your phone to do many of the things that this generation of consoles can do, there are a few benefits.

One being that with consoles we can play local multiplayer games, while we can’t currently play games over the internet, having a dedicated in-room multiplayer device is something a single phone cannot do just yet. But many of the features of Ouya are already available to tablet and phone users. A quick search on Lifehacker and a few cheap cables will have your phone playing movies and games all while using gaming controllers.

It is possible that mobile gaming and phone/tablet technology will simply outpace this generation of Ouya and its competitions. For most of them this seems likely, if you’re primarily playing single-player games and can easily access your television then why invest in another piece of equipment?

Besides being outpaced by the very system that they’ve been built around, another serious problem faces the coming wave of Android-powered consoles. Rumors have been rumbling that Google and Amazon are both releasing consoles powered by Android.

A Google or Amazon level company could compete at the same level as Sony or Microsoft in a way that Ouya or any of its competitors simply cannot match. Rumors are that Amazon will be dropping its new console before the end of 2013 with the potential of blowing everything else out of the water. With a huge exclusive library and enough leverage to sell their console at a loss, they could survive only on app sales and massive promotions. For these companies it only makes sense to expand into the hardware market, since they already own the software.

If you haven’t bought one yet and you’re not a developer it may be a bad idea to buy an Ouya or one of its competitors just for the games. The future may hold great promise for these micro-consoles; unfortunately it may not come fast enough.