Ouya is going to kill the Kickstarter brand. These guys have no clue how to manufacture any hardware and are seriously underestimating the difficulty of turning a prototype into an assembly line. There will be many delays and broken promises on the way to a very late and very disappointing final product, and the whole well-publicized ordeal is going to poison Kickstarter in people's minds.
Can anyone who's done outsourced hardware comment on how hard that part actually is? I mean, if I met with someone from Foxconn and said, "listen, I need to you to take this 3d model of a plastic case, slam in an Android SoC and some I/O ports and a power supply and have test units ready in two months and another 50,000 ready to go by March, I can give you $80 a piece up front" -- could I plausibly get something of decent quality? What does this process actually require on the retail end in terms of time and money and expertise?
Seems to me the controller might be the hard part -- more UX testing, less standard parts. But I'd love to hear from someone who's solved this kind of problem.
It's somewhat amusing to me to see several comments on this thread wave away the actual hardware as an "outsourced design" or "just call Asus". I have to assume it's a result of people not understanding the complexity of modern hardware.
First, I've been unable in my (admittedly, cursory) research to discover any prebuilt systems that even come close to their promised hardware specs. So until someone proves me wrong by posting a link to an OTS solution even close to what they're promising, lets assume that the system needs custom design.
This is a whole massive can of worms. I have some experience with hardware design (though not as much as a full-blown EE), and I'd ballpark hardware design alone as a half-year effort with multiple full-time EEs. And that's a best-case optimistic estimate. People who work in software don't seem to understand how hard this stuff is. It's not like you can simply take another schematic, slap the new parts you want on, delete the old parts, autoroute it and call it a day. With parts of this complexity there's a whole host of other design issues that come out of the woodwork. High-frequency switching means if one of your autorouted traces is longer than another, you're going to have timing issues. Crosstalk between layers, capacitance and inductance of the wires themselves can wreak havoc on your busses. You need to intelligently design the ground planes, separate your signals (analog and digital components), etc etc etc.
These are only the issues I'm aware of. I'm sure people experienced with creating boards this complex can fill me in on more. It's not like a hobby arduino project - hooking up traces to debug problems can increase the capacitance of a line enough to cause a new set of problems.
This isn't really directed just towards you, but it feels like a ton of people here are missing how difficult hardware design with components this complex is.
Price point: $384. With an LCD. This isn't even close to comparable to the product they're trying to make. So to close the gap, you say:
> Drop the camera, the touch screen, the battery and the enclosure, I bet you I could get a deal for these boards well under $50 for 10,000+ lots.
Engineering tightly integrated consumer electronics products like these isn't a menu. You can't just "unplug" the monitor "remove" the battery and then repackage it. Redesign of a processor board of this complexity isn't a picnic; it takes significant EE expertise.
And with an initial price point almost 4x that Ouya promises? Please. This isn't "comparable" at all. You want a comparable piece of hardware? See http://trimslice.com/web/order-direct. Twice the price point with significantly less horsepower. That's what people are probably going to get in the end with this project.
Firstly, the question was "there is no comparable system on the market with those specs," I was pointing out there was a system with those specs, which has already been cloned.
Secondly, the screen, battery, and about 50% of the time the camera, are NOT integral on the board. They plug into headers. I'm not sure who's misinformed you of this, but not everyone designs like Apple. And yes, I can "just remove the screen, battery, and likely the camera." I just don't plug them into the headers. How many EEs do you think are working in China for these manufacturers?
Thirdly, it's interesting that you have both insight into the margins of several different hardware manufacturers and also into the internal R&D discussions of Ouya to know that they are going to end up selling a $200 Tegra2 instead of a $99 Tegra3 device. Gosh, they should've just hired you, no?
Why so aggressive arguing that they can't do it? It's one thing to be suspicious (and I, am suspicious as to their ability to hold reasonable overall margins unless they intend to make over 50k of these), it's another to spread FUD that something is impossible.
You CAN'T just unplug the screen, battery, and camera from the board and then stuff it into a new form factor. The board will have to be redesigned to fit into a new form factor and accommodate new peripherals. This will take significant time and effort, regardless of whether the engineering is done in the US, China, or Zimbabwe.
> Thirdly, it's interesting that you have both insight into the margins of several different hardware manufacturers and also into the internal R&D discussions of Ouya to know that they are going to end up selling a $200 Tegra2 instead of a $99 Tegra3 device. Gosh, they should've just hired you, no?
This is just silly. I point out a system on the market with much closer specs to what Ouya is trying to accomplish (no screen, similar outputs, etc) and point out that's still twice their price point. I have seen no evidence from Ouya, you, or anyone else that they can do anything different. Until then, I'll remain skeptical that they'll deliver on their promises.
> Why so aggressive arguing that they can't do it?
It'd be awesome if they pulled it off; I'm just pointing out that they probably won't. And if I came off as aggressive, it's because of all the armchair engineers around here who think consumer hardware design is a walk in the park that can be completed on a whim in an instant.
> it's another to spread FUD that something is impossible.
Go find where I said "impossible". My entire post just points out how unlikely it is this project is going to deliver what it promises.
Your entire day is made easier and your life longer because many people ignored comments like this to produce all the services and inventions you now take for granted.
"We break things. Julie Uhrman has been in games for a long time, at Vivendi Universal, IGN, GameFly, and other places. Yves Behar is the award-winning designer of Jambox, One Laptop per Child, and many others. There are plenty of other people involved, but some of them would get fired if we tell you who they are."
Julie Uhrman is an executive (http://www.linkedin.com/in/julieuhrman). Yves Behar is a designer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_B%C3%A9har). Until I hear about the involvement of at least one full-time electrical engineer and embedded software developer, I'll be highly skeptical that they can deliver anything that they promise.
Especially in the time frame cited; I've worked in both fields and unless they have experienced full-time engineers and developers working on this right now there's no way they're making the deadline. The "we have a prototype" is at best a vague indicator of progress. Do they have a board designed? Has it been fabricated? Do they even have android running on the hardware they plan on using?
If not, are they using off-the-shelf boards? I can't find any Tegra 2 OTS boards available remotely within the price point they list, much less Tegra 3.
And the "some of them would get fired if we tell you who they are" is more disconcerting than assuring. If they do have people with engineering/manufacturing/software development expertise these people do not believe in this project enough to leave their day job. That should speak for itself.
EDIT: for example, see http://trimslice.com/web/order-direct. Their Tegra 2 board with more modest hardware specifications is only available at more than twice the price point touted for Ouya. Note that this doesn't even include the cost of the custom bundled controller, which is itself a substantial hardware undertaking.
Concept design and manufacturing are completely different things. I'm talking about manufacturing experience, and they have none. Zero. You can be sure they'd have mentioned it if they did. Let me address their only revealed experience: "Vivendi Universal, IGN, GameFly," those are all 100% software. "[They] would get fired if we tell you who they are", really? They're asking for millions of our dollars and they aren't confident enough to even minimally risk their current jobs by publicly supporting their own project? That's a huge red flag.
The console industry is littered with spectacular failures of this type, and I'm before I believe this one is worth investing actual money in I'm going to need more than Yves Behar, Julie Uhrman who's "been in the game industry for years" (exclusively on the software side), and several mysterious people who refuse to even be named.
Really? How do you know they have no clue how to manufacture any hardware? I can see their pedigree, what do you know about it that the rest of us don't?
On the other hand, the current generation of game consoles is very underpowered compared to commodity hardware these days. That means that you can probably produce a product that competes with them in specs very cheaply, which Ouya can take advantage of. I really don't think that hardware is going to be their biggest challenge.
There are past projects that might make a person wary of an unproven company trying to produce a console. There's the Phantom, which is fairly infamous. And the Open Pandora guys still haven't manufactured enough consoles to even fulfill preorders, several years on.
Yes, but we're talking about a project being designed by one of the more famous industrial designers in the world, who also works for other hardware manufacturers (Jawbone, for example), and more than likely has a very deep network of hardware manufacturing contacts to draw upon. Just because some projects failed doesn't mean every related project will fail - unless the assumption here is that the only companies capable of bringing a console of any sort to market are MS, Sony, and Nintendo these days.
Yes, but it doesn't hurt to be skeptical. Everyone who pledges should know they're paying for a product that doesn't exist yet and currently has no confirmed games. The project description does everything it can to gloss that over, and even outright lies in some places (like with the Minecraft thing).
