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It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and c

It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and calling them "amateurs". What is up with that? HN is supposed to be about the cutting edge and it just dumped all over this project which then went on to get $1million in 8 hours. I suggest a sizable part of the HN "doesn't get it". And this saddens and bugs me. I come to HN for the news and also very much the commentary. But suddenly there seems like this big anti android pro iOS bias and a bunch of curmudgeons running things. This device looks really cool, has amazing potential, is near free for a console and clearly has amazing demand but HN put out the hate. What gives? This isn't the first time I've noticed this. Recently several neat android related announcements have gotten some strongly negative commentary here and even none announcement iOS articles have gotten glowing praise. :(

w1ntermute 14y ago
> It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and calling them "amateurs". I think there's a significant proportion of the HN userbase that responds to things like Kickstarter funding with indignation, because it neatly circumvents the VC funding process that so many of us have suffered through. It's almost a "How dare they raise so much money without jumping through hoops like I did?"
- mindstab 14y ago
  So people find a better way to get money and the old hardened crowd here gets cranky? How fast we grow into curmudgeons. I need to find a new "hacker news" that still has the spirit and would say "holy cow, congrats, amazing work, and we should look to see if we can exploit that next time too". So much for the spirit of the entrepreneur and hacker. Seems old school corporate crankiness. :(
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    Lamernews? If not that, then would you use it if I made an alternative?
    - mindstab 14y ago
      That's the terribly hard thing about building a worthwhile community and what draws us all here. You need some strong nucleus and just as you don't know me from jack, I don't know you either. PG founded this place initially and that drew most of us here. Then that community he brought kept us here. Now in some people's opinions it may be getting a bit sour, but it's also been amazing for a long (longer than average on the net?) time. That's a good accomplishment. But as to your question? I don't know you and don't see why any clone you created would be any better than one I created. I came here as much for the commentary. And it's that I'm starting to loose respect for. I don't see how you or I could replicate that on our own. It's not simple this community building and maintaining game.
      - heretohelp 14y ago
        I just ask questions, you shouldn't assume any real volitional intent on my part.
- trotsky 14y ago
  I intentionally avoided chiming in on that thread so I didn't sound like a sourpuss. I'm not sure if it's jealousy alone, but I feel like it's bit improper for people to be moving those kind of volumes on products so early in their design cycle. So many things can and do go wrong especially with what's a reasonably complex software/hardware ecosystem - it sounded like they hadn't really started a lot of it yet. Projects are hard to bring in on time even when you're pretty experienced with the platform etc. I'm not saying they're not going to be successful, it's just from a statistical point of view I would expect some of these high profile long lead time deals to implode. Which isn't to say I object to them as obviously the interest is there, but I'm not sure I'd feel ok taking millions in orders before I had at least done a tiny engineering sample run, had a set of testable software etc. Because even the people who are pros have to go back to the drawing board sometimes. Anyway I do agree with you - I feel a bit of resentment about some of these big kickstarter deals, but I try to keep it to myself. Ones that are simpler or are really just using it as a pre-order tool don't bug me at all.
prayag 14y ago
This has been bothering me as well. HN has gotten into a habit of shitting all over new ideas, innovations and technology start-ups. It's not just android or iOS, nor is it about taking VC money or not. It's about trying to do something different and showing promise. If you do that a large part of HN community will just shit all over you. This is very different from the community a few years or even a few months ago. These people are trying to disrupt a market that solely belongs to big players (MS, Sony and Nintendo), shouldn't we be happy that a smaller player is trying to enter the tough market. That deserves some applause and a pat on the back, doesn't it?
- mindstab 14y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly and that's why I was so shocked and sad and dismayed to read the comment thread here. It seems like the spirit of HN is drying up and dying. :( Community growth is hard to manage and HN has done amazingly well avoiding previous pitfalls like falling to trolls but now it looks like something new and more subtle is befalling it. :/
  - alttab 14y ago
    I agree and disagree. First, the original thread was overtly negative and that surprised me. I even commented in that thread saying as much. Generally, I think the HN community got that one wrong, and its obvious too because they got $1million in less than 24 hours which is more than anyone can say for half the projects that get posted here. And on that note, the negativity, it seems to me, is largely due to the ballooning of this community and a bunch of half-baked, unoriginal, crowded-market ideas with uninspired product designs being posted. It seems everyone thinks that just because they use NodeJS, mustache, coffeescript and want to take a bottom-up approach to X for Y and apply to YC that makes them an entrepreneur. While these people are embarking on a learning process a "black cup of coffee" never hurt anyone.
    - prayag 14y ago
      > is largely due to the ballooning of this community and a bunch of half-baked, unoriginal, crowded-market ideas with uninspired product designs being posted. It seems everyone thinks that just because they use NodeJS, mustache, coffeescript and want to take a bottom-up approach to X for Y and apply to YC that makes them an entrepreneur. But what's wrong with that? If this doesn't make them an entrepreneur what does? There is no magic to becoming an entrepreneur. It's not an elite group of people who have to pass a trial by fire. Everyone who wants to change things can be an entrepreneur. Anyone with a project and who big dreams for the project.It doesn't require a college degree, any connections or any credentials. If anyone comes to me and tells me he is an entrepreneur I expect myself to be supportive. It's hard to do this and if we don't support each other who will?
msie 14y ago
I hope they succeed because I hate the closed systems of the big three. I would love to develop/ship some software without having to jump through the many hoops that the big three put up. That said I am skeptical that they will build a machine that I would fall in love with. There are so many problems with what's listed: - not enough RAM - not enough secondary storage - no DVD/Blu Ray drive - powerful enough video card? - controller button layout not suitable for colour-blind people Add those items and bump up the price $100 and I'm in. I want this to succeed and they don't have many chances to get it right.
- mtgx 14y ago
  What makes you say there isn't enough RAM? Are you saying it from a "future-proof" point of view? You're only going to run one game at a time, and I don't think Android games can even use more than 50 MB of RAM or something (just like they can't on iOS). The graphics are good enough for this price. We're talking indie games here, not AAA games.
  - msie 14y ago
    There's never enough RAM. :-) I do hope that it can run some AAA games because I want it to disrupt the market that the big 3 dominate.
    - mtgx 14y ago
      But disrupting a market completely doesn't happen from the first generations. It took even Apple a few generations to bring down Nokia and RIM, the former leaders of the smartphone market. So I wouldn't worry about this right now. Plus, there's this trend where people are starting to care less and less about graphics and more about gameplay. That's how disruptions happen. They change the "rules of the game". They don't try to beat the old leaders with the same tricks (graphics performance), but with different ones (better gameplay, more games from indies, free to play, cheaper console etc). If you think this console needs to be able to "compete" with PS4 and Xbox 360, you're looking at this in a very wrong way. Most of the people that will buy OUYA probably won't even be former Xbox/PS3 customers. I remember when the iPhone came out, 80% of the people buying them were not "smartphone buyers". They were dumbphone buyers. It took a few years before the people who swore by their Symbian and Blackberry "smartphones" (which had "many more features") started getting interested in iPhones and Android phones.
ThomPete 14y ago
It's a two edged sword. When you have this many smart people in a community a lot of the right questions are being asked. The same people however are often not in any position to judge the business potential of something simply. My own rule is to try and abide the three rules of feedback. 1. Don't assume other people are idiots 2. Given the right premises everything is possible 3. Give critique either with a suggestion to solve it or as a question that can be answered.
- TylerE 14y ago
  Of course, at the same time, given the history of phantomware in the console sector, I'll be a lot more impressed when the actually ship good, functional hardware.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    But that's the great thing about time. It will tell. The majority of the comments in the previous thread was about the hardware which as always is a bad indicator of success. Just go revisit the original geek comments about the iPads configuration when that came out. Wrong axis to judge somethings success based on.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I'm fine with people pointing out the potential pitfalls. That's how I think about things myself. The problem I have with the other thread is that the very first thing you read is "Looks like amateur hour." That's a problem of tone, not content, and it's something that can be fixed at zero loss to the value of the site. By us, the users. Discourage negative tone, encourage actual thinking.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    I agree hence my personal 3 rules of feedback :)
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    I don't think someone asking for a million-plus dollars of the public's money for their project deserves protection from slightly harsh critique. I made no personal assaults on the developers in question and provided a short list of detailed critiques about the project and apparently the only thing you read was the first sentence. What do you think is harmful about that? Do you think the critique would be more useful if I prefaced it with glowing praise that I didn't actually mean? If you went and pitched your project to an angel asking for $50-100k of money, or went and pitched to a VC, would you expect them to be all rainbows and sunshine? Or would you expect them to be honest and tell you why they aren't interested in giving you money so that you can improve and address issues?
6ren 14y ago
For quite a while, HN has been dominated by negative comments in general, many of which are also simply ignorant. Occasionally, you'll see an old-time comment, full of relevant facts (and generally with some balance, since it's usually hard to be 100% biased when using facts). Therefore, I mostly avoid the comments on HN these days. The stories themselves can sometimes be interesting, but now I'm finding ol' slashdot is better for that. My suggestion to fix this is to focus on stories that are "intellectually stimulating" and dropping topical news altogether (or having them in a separate frontpage). "Industry News and Gossip" is part of the problem, I believe. It doesn't promote discussions that are intellectually stimulating, and it doesn't attract people who value intellectual stimulation. There's a thousand other news sites - it's never what made HN valuable. Sadly, HN has that pesky "news" in its name, despite the guidelines seeming to not be about news: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- wavephorm 14y ago
  HN has been dominated by negative comments in general No the problem is the comment voting system on HN is completely pointless, and doesn't allow good comments to rise to the surface. So you end up reading all good/positive and all bad/negative comments as if they are the same.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
It will be interesting to see how it plays out. There are some unanswered questions, things like "Hmm that seems awfully inexpensive given where you are starting from." So let's assume nVidia gives them a great deal and they pay $10/CPU, plus memory, plus flash, plus assembly. We're looking at $65 or so to build it. Consider something like the Beaglebone which uses a cheaper CPU and its costs. Now historically game console manufacturers sold consoles near (or below!) cost and then made up the difference selling licensees as part of the games, made famous by Nintendo early on, the 'custom game cart' that they had to make for you. But these guys want to keep games low cost (even free) so that's a challenge. Then there is the OS, sure its a port of Android but it isn't Android. It has their own stuff in it, and like all complex software packages Android is full of bugs of varying complexity, and being a bit 'off axis' as they are they will probably wander into less tested code. So they no doubt have at least one and probably two or three full time Android kernel/system engineers. So that's like a .5M$/yr burdened cost, more so if they do point optimizations to improve their user experience. We've got the Founder(s) (presumably the designer is on contract and they can jettison those ongoing costs once they are done) so say they run a really tight ship, maybe 10 people? So maybe they have a $6M/yr burn rate. How much do they have to sell to cover those costs? What numbers did they promise their suppliers? Lets be generous and say they can sell 100K units the first year. That would require clearing $60/unit to break even. They currently have about 13K backers, so for everyone one they sell on Kickstarter they will need another 10 to sell somewhere else. Or, perhaps the Kickstarter project is all there is. Once they make the 13 - 15k units (or what ever it ends up to be) for the developers they are done. They walk away. What sort of future does any console have when rounded to the nearest million units there are zero out there ? So its an interesting thing indeed. Having played with Android on the Pandaboard I can say its not a 'fun' place to be (well if you're trying to get something done, if you just want to hack Android its great fun) Obviously you can't know if it will be a runaway success or a well meaning implosion but either way its enlightening to see this crowd funded business model tried for this class of goods.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
  It's not going to be fully free probably. They're using it to bootstrap a game marketplace for their currency or whatever. They're probably going to have a facebook credits equivalent and that's how they'll make their money. Also whatever they can make from hardware.
josephcooney 14y ago
Agree. Most stories that paint apple in an unfavourable light that I post never seem to go anywhere. Yesterday I saw this on the verge and posted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222245 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222245 , to the sound of a deafening "meh".
cooldeal 14y ago
If you think HN is anti-Android, then look at what happens to stories and comments about Microsoft. Stories are flagged and comments are downvoted based on party line voting.
martingordon 14y ago
I didn't post anything in the original thread, but I had a negative initial reaction to the original article. For me, at least, it has to do with three things: 1. The framing of the product. They make it sound like it will change to landscape of the video game market, not that it could. This type of grandiose posturing reeks of snake oil to me and turns me off completely. The device be a moderate success and sell a couple of million of units, but there's no way that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Apple (yes, Apple) are going to see it as a threat to their current gaming ecosystems. Each currently have an installed base of at least 60 million (with the admittedly dead-end Wii coming in at almost 100 million and iOS at over 200 million), and more importantly, household recognition thanks to millions in advertising spend. What needs to happen for this device to end up in 50 million living rooms? How likely are those things to happen? 2. Being wildly successful on Kickstarter is one thing, having social proof in the form of professional funding (VC, angel, and/or otherwise) is another thing. After all, it's easier to get 10,000 people to give you $100 than it is for one person to give you $1 million. I am strongly opposed to the "raise money now, make money later" approach to startups and wholeheartedly believe that it is possible to build a software startup by bootstrapping. That said (and this might just be due to my inexperience with hardware development), I don't know that it's possible to build a successful hardware business that requires significant capital outlay to get started without outside funding. Are these things profitable at the $99 price point? If not, where is the cash going to come from to mass produce these. Is 10-100k purchases enough to swing a Series A, even if those 10-100k were sold at or below cost? Kickstarter seems like a great way to sell small-batch, niche products, but not necessary any huge mainstream successes. All of it boils down to this: I used to like innovative products just because they're innovative, but I've seen too many "great" products burned by a lack of a viable business behind the product. If I'm going to commit to a product or service, I need to know that it will be around for the long haul. I can no longer judge products on their own, I have to judge them based on their viability on the marketplace.
five_star 14y ago
I also believe android has potential in the market. I wonder why the thread seems to go against it.
kevingadd 14y ago
As an author of one of the comments that apparently has made people so upset, I guess I should respond. I don't see what your problem with my comment was. I provided a short list of clearly stated arguments why I believe their price point is unfounded and will impair their ability to ship a product, and why the price point (along with the marketing) suggests an incomplete knowledge of the problems they're attempting to address. Why does this matter? Two reasons: First, every large Kickstarter that takes money and fails to deliver will be an enormous hit to the viability of crowd-funding in general, and potentially increase the difficulties faced by other crowd-funded projects in terms of convincing backers to wait patiently for release. If something like the Ouya collects $3M in kickstarter funding and flames out violently, you can bet there will be lawyers lining up to file class action suits. Once this happens, the doors are probably open for harmful actions against all sorts of crowd-funded projects. This is all the more troublesome because game projects are in general troubled projects, so adding the spectre of legal threats isn't exactly going to improve things. Second, the degree to which the project feels slapped together or not well thought out suggests a potential to cause harmful effects on the development community and the way game players engage with it. While from a revenue perspective, the modern wave of free-to-play and Facebook games is a tremendous thing - making plenty of people rich - the social effects are yet to be fully understood. The mechanics heavily leveraged by these games are, to the extent they are understood by psychology and testing, not harmless and in some cases extremely harmful to the players over both the short and long term. The business models behind these games fundamentally encourage building around singular players spending to the limit of their ability (or beyond it), and use the kind of abusive terminology previously used in casinos and the development of slot machines. Now there are even companies trying to convince game developers to use their middleware to turn their games into actual slot machines where players gamble real money. Ouya's push is heavily predicated on it being about free to play games, the vast majority of which fall into the previously described category - destructive and built on psychological manipulation. The low price point means that Ouya would be the perfect choice for lower-income families that would otherwise not consider buying an expensive game console, and the emphasis on Android games being 'cheap' means that the majority of the games out there will be free downloads or a $1 purchase with the intent of getting players onto the microtransaction treadmill. I do not think this sort of future is good for anyone except investors (though in the short term, developers will benefit tremendously). So I suppose yes, You could say that I "don't get it": I don't get why you would decide to abuse your entire customer base for short term profit at the expense of long term market health. Some of the anger and dismissiveness in comments probably is, as you say, just about how it's android or about how it's open source or about how it was crowdfunded instead of VCd, or whatever. None of that is really a concern for me, as a person who doesn't own any Apple devices, hates OS X, uses an Android phone, develops open source projects, and hasn't ever been given a cent by venture capitalists or angel investors. I still think Ouya is probably going to be a bad thing unless the people running the project make a serious effort to curtail the potential for it to cause negative consequences for the industry as a whole.
checoivan 14y ago
I agree, people seem negative focusing too much in outermost layer like memory size, or that it isn't as powerful as an xbox. take a look at this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_retail_could_hit_sixyear_low_in_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_ret... The trend is game sales are down year over year. Studios are closing because massive multi million dollar productions are simply unsustainable. You see games being more expensive, have ads and sponsors on it, gameplay is cut down and sold as expensive downloadable content, and every game is using gimmicks like plastic toys to be able to sell a game copy for 99 or 150 bucks. And every year publishers have to one up in themselves like Charlie sheen going from a week long to a month long party. Another concrete example: Kingdom of Amalur's developer Studio 38. The game has an epic franchise, great reviews, strong first month sales. The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC. Development for consoles is very inaccesible. Even for XBox which uses DirectX and can be downloaded. How many of people you know that programmed a ps3 game in college? ' There has to be a reversal of this trends and a console like this seems like a step in the right direction. So far seems like only nintendo figured out it's all about delivering fun that people like, not who has the biggest processor. People doubt the 99 dollar price. Maybe it comes out being 150 or slightly more expensive, we don't know. It can definitively be cheap. Supposedly a Nexus 7 costs 184 dollars to make, 57 are just for the screen. Take out the screen, sensors,camera, battery, cut down memory...It sounds reasonable it could hit the price point.
- laserDinosaur 14y ago
  "The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC" Not exactly. They broke even if not made a little profit on Kingdom of Amalur, not bad for a new IP from a new company. What killed them was they were building a massive MMO on the side that, accordiding to the Giant Bomb guys, never had enough money to finish and was funded from quarter to quarter based on new investments. A huge gamble. When the mayor came out saying they were a poor investment, their money dried up overnight and nobody would touch them. So, with a partially built MMO and bills needing to be paid they shut their doors. (source - ramblings from the Giant Bomb podcast and E3 interviews with David Jaffe)

w1ntermute 14y ago

> It's interesting how negative the original HN thread is. Everything from "it's too underpowered" to straight up "Gaming on android is a sad, laggy affair" and calling them "amateurs". I think there's a significant proportion of the HN userbase that responds to things like Kickstarter funding with indignation, because it neatly circumvents the VC funding process that so many of us have suffered through. It's almost a "How dare they raise so much money without jumping through hoops like I did?"

mindstab 14y ago
So people find a better way to get money and the old hardened crowd here gets cranky? How fast we grow into curmudgeons. I need to find a new "hacker news" that still has the spirit and would say "holy cow, congrats, amazing work, and we should look to see if we can exploit that next time too". So much for the spirit of the entrepreneur and hacker. Seems old school corporate crankiness. :(
- heretohelp 14y ago
  Lamernews? If not that, then would you use it if I made an alternative?
  - mindstab 14y ago
    That's the terribly hard thing about building a worthwhile community and what draws us all here. You need some strong nucleus and just as you don't know me from jack, I don't know you either. PG founded this place initially and that drew most of us here. Then that community he brought kept us here. Now in some people's opinions it may be getting a bit sour, but it's also been amazing for a long (longer than average on the net?) time. That's a good accomplishment. But as to your question? I don't know you and don't see why any clone you created would be any better than one I created. I came here as much for the commentary. And it's that I'm starting to loose respect for. I don't see how you or I could replicate that on our own. It's not simple this community building and maintaining game.
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      I just ask questions, you shouldn't assume any real volitional intent on my part.
trotsky 14y ago
I intentionally avoided chiming in on that thread so I didn't sound like a sourpuss. I'm not sure if it's jealousy alone, but I feel like it's bit improper for people to be moving those kind of volumes on products so early in their design cycle. So many things can and do go wrong especially with what's a reasonably complex software/hardware ecosystem - it sounded like they hadn't really started a lot of it yet. Projects are hard to bring in on time even when you're pretty experienced with the platform etc. I'm not saying they're not going to be successful, it's just from a statistical point of view I would expect some of these high profile long lead time deals to implode. Which isn't to say I object to them as obviously the interest is there, but I'm not sure I'd feel ok taking millions in orders before I had at least done a tiny engineering sample run, had a set of testable software etc. Because even the people who are pros have to go back to the drawing board sometimes. Anyway I do agree with you - I feel a bit of resentment about some of these big kickstarter deals, but I try to keep it to myself. Ones that are simpler or are really just using it as a pre-order tool don't bug me at all.

prayag 14y ago

This has been bothering me as well. HN has gotten into a habit of shitting all over new ideas, innovations and technology start-ups. It's not just android or iOS, nor is it about taking VC money or not. It's about trying to do something different and showing promise. If you do that a large part of HN community will just shit all over you. This is very different from the community a few years or even a few months ago. These people are trying to disrupt a market that solely belongs to big players (MS, Sony and Nintendo), shouldn't we be happy that a smaller player is trying to enter the tough market. That deserves some applause and a pat on the back, doesn't it?

mindstab 14y ago
I agree wholeheartedly and that's why I was so shocked and sad and dismayed to read the comment thread here. It seems like the spirit of HN is drying up and dying. :( Community growth is hard to manage and HN has done amazingly well avoiding previous pitfalls like falling to trolls but now it looks like something new and more subtle is befalling it. :/
- alttab 14y ago
  I agree and disagree. First, the original thread was overtly negative and that surprised me. I even commented in that thread saying as much. Generally, I think the HN community got that one wrong, and its obvious too because they got $1million in less than 24 hours which is more than anyone can say for half the projects that get posted here. And on that note, the negativity, it seems to me, is largely due to the ballooning of this community and a bunch of half-baked, unoriginal, crowded-market ideas with uninspired product designs being posted. It seems everyone thinks that just because they use NodeJS, mustache, coffeescript and want to take a bottom-up approach to X for Y and apply to YC that makes them an entrepreneur. While these people are embarking on a learning process a "black cup of coffee" never hurt anyone.
  - prayag 14y ago
    > is largely due to the ballooning of this community and a bunch of half-baked, unoriginal, crowded-market ideas with uninspired product designs being posted. It seems everyone thinks that just because they use NodeJS, mustache, coffeescript and want to take a bottom-up approach to X for Y and apply to YC that makes them an entrepreneur. But what's wrong with that? If this doesn't make them an entrepreneur what does? There is no magic to becoming an entrepreneur. It's not an elite group of people who have to pass a trial by fire. Everyone who wants to change things can be an entrepreneur. Anyone with a project and who big dreams for the project.It doesn't require a college degree, any connections or any credentials. If anyone comes to me and tells me he is an entrepreneur I expect myself to be supportive. It's hard to do this and if we don't support each other who will?

msie 14y ago

I hope they succeed because I hate the closed systems of the big three. I would love to develop/ship some software without having to jump through the many hoops that the big three put up. That said I am skeptical that they will build a machine that I would fall in love with. There are so many problems with what's listed: - not enough RAM - not enough secondary storage - no DVD/Blu Ray drive - powerful enough video card? - controller button layout not suitable for colour-blind people Add those items and bump up the price $100 and I'm in. I want this to succeed and they don't have many chances to get it right.

mtgx 14y ago
What makes you say there isn't enough RAM? Are you saying it from a "future-proof" point of view? You're only going to run one game at a time, and I don't think Android games can even use more than 50 MB of RAM or something (just like they can't on iOS). The graphics are good enough for this price. We're talking indie games here, not AAA games.
- msie 14y ago
  There's never enough RAM. :-) I do hope that it can run some AAA games because I want it to disrupt the market that the big 3 dominate.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    But disrupting a market completely doesn't happen from the first generations. It took even Apple a few generations to bring down Nokia and RIM, the former leaders of the smartphone market. So I wouldn't worry about this right now. Plus, there's this trend where people are starting to care less and less about graphics and more about gameplay. That's how disruptions happen. They change the "rules of the game". They don't try to beat the old leaders with the same tricks (graphics performance), but with different ones (better gameplay, more games from indies, free to play, cheaper console etc). If you think this console needs to be able to "compete" with PS4 and Xbox 360, you're looking at this in a very wrong way. Most of the people that will buy OUYA probably won't even be former Xbox/PS3 customers. I remember when the iPhone came out, 80% of the people buying them were not "smartphone buyers". They were dumbphone buyers. It took a few years before the people who swore by their Symbian and Blackberry "smartphones" (which had "many more features") started getting interested in iPhones and Android phones.

ThomPete 14y ago

It's a two edged sword. When you have this many smart people in a community a lot of the right questions are being asked. The same people however are often not in any position to judge the business potential of something simply. My own rule is to try and abide the three rules of feedback. 1. Don't assume other people are idiots 2. Given the right premises everything is possible 3. Give critique either with a suggestion to solve it or as a question that can be answered.

TylerE 14y ago
Of course, at the same time, given the history of phantomware in the console sector, I'll be a lot more impressed when the actually ship good, functional hardware.
- ThomPete 14y ago
  But that's the great thing about time. It will tell. The majority of the comments in the previous thread was about the hardware which as always is a bad indicator of success. Just go revisit the original geek comments about the iPads configuration when that came out. Wrong axis to judge somethings success based on.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
I'm fine with people pointing out the potential pitfalls. That's how I think about things myself. The problem I have with the other thread is that the very first thing you read is "Looks like amateur hour." That's a problem of tone, not content, and it's something that can be fixed at zero loss to the value of the site. By us, the users. Discourage negative tone, encourage actual thinking.
- ThomPete 14y ago
  I agree hence my personal 3 rules of feedback :)
- kevingadd 14y ago
  I don't think someone asking for a million-plus dollars of the public's money for their project deserves protection from slightly harsh critique. I made no personal assaults on the developers in question and provided a short list of detailed critiques about the project and apparently the only thing you read was the first sentence. What do you think is harmful about that? Do you think the critique would be more useful if I prefaced it with glowing praise that I didn't actually mean? If you went and pitched your project to an angel asking for $50-100k of money, or went and pitched to a VC, would you expect them to be all rainbows and sunshine? Or would you expect them to be honest and tell you why they aren't interested in giving you money so that you can improve and address issues?

6ren 14y ago

For quite a while, HN has been dominated by negative comments in general, many of which are also simply ignorant. Occasionally, you'll see an old-time comment, full of relevant facts (and generally with some balance, since it's usually hard to be 100% biased when using facts). Therefore, I mostly avoid the comments on HN these days. The stories themselves can sometimes be interesting, but now I'm finding ol' slashdot is better for that. My suggestion to fix this is to focus on stories that are "intellectually stimulating" and dropping topical news altogether (or having them in a separate frontpage). "Industry News and Gossip" is part of the problem, I believe. It doesn't promote discussions that are intellectually stimulating, and it doesn't attract people who value intellectual stimulation. There's a thousand other news sites - it's never what made HN valuable. Sadly, HN has that pesky "news" in its name, despite the guidelines seeming to not be about news: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

wavephorm 14y ago
HN has been dominated by negative comments in general No the problem is the comment voting system on HN is completely pointless, and doesn't allow good comments to rise to the surface. So you end up reading all good/positive and all bad/negative comments as if they are the same.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. There are some unanswered questions, things like "Hmm that seems awfully inexpensive given where you are starting from." So let's assume nVidia gives them a great deal and they pay $10/CPU, plus memory, plus flash, plus assembly. We're looking at $65 or so to build it. Consider something like the Beaglebone which uses a cheaper CPU and its costs. Now historically game console manufacturers sold consoles near (or below!) cost and then made up the difference selling licensees as part of the games, made famous by Nintendo early on, the 'custom game cart' that they had to make for you. But these guys want to keep games low cost (even free) so that's a challenge. Then there is the OS, sure its a port of Android but it isn't Android. It has their own stuff in it, and like all complex software packages Android is full of bugs of varying complexity, and being a bit 'off axis' as they are they will probably wander into less tested code. So they no doubt have at least one and probably two or three full time Android kernel/system engineers. So that's like a .5M$/yr burdened cost, more so if they do point optimizations to improve their user experience. We've got the Founder(s) (presumably the designer is on contract and they can jettison those ongoing costs once they are done) so say they run a really tight ship, maybe 10 people? So maybe they have a $6M/yr burn rate. How much do they have to sell to cover those costs? What numbers did they promise their suppliers? Lets be generous and say they can sell 100K units the first year. That would require clearing $60/unit to break even. They currently have about 13K backers, so for everyone one they sell on Kickstarter they will need another 10 to sell somewhere else. Or, perhaps the Kickstarter project is all there is. Once they make the 13 - 15k units (or what ever it ends up to be) for the developers they are done. They walk away. What sort of future does any console have when rounded to the nearest million units there are zero out there ? So its an interesting thing indeed. Having played with Android on the Pandaboard I can say its not a 'fun' place to be (well if you're trying to get something done, if you just want to hack Android its great fun) Obviously you can't know if it will be a runaway success or a well meaning implosion but either way its enlightening to see this crowd funded business model tried for this class of goods.

KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
It's not going to be fully free probably. They're using it to bootstrap a game marketplace for their currency or whatever. They're probably going to have a facebook credits equivalent and that's how they'll make their money. Also whatever they can make from hardware.

josephcooney 14y ago

Agree. Most stories that paint apple in an unfavourable light that I post never seem to go anywhere. Yesterday I saw this on the verge and posted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222245 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222245 , to the sound of a deafening "meh".

cooldeal 14y ago

If you think HN is anti-Android, then look at what happens to stories and comments about Microsoft. Stories are flagged and comments are downvoted based on party line voting.

martingordon 14y ago

I didn't post anything in the original thread, but I had a negative initial reaction to the original article. For me, at least, it has to do with three things: 1. The framing of the product. They make it sound like it will change to landscape of the video game market, not that it could. This type of grandiose posturing reeks of snake oil to me and turns me off completely. The device be a moderate success and sell a couple of million of units, but there's no way that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Apple (yes, Apple) are going to see it as a threat to their current gaming ecosystems. Each currently have an installed base of at least 60 million (with the admittedly dead-end Wii coming in at almost 100 million and iOS at over 200 million), and more importantly, household recognition thanks to millions in advertising spend. What needs to happen for this device to end up in 50 million living rooms? How likely are those things to happen? 2. Being wildly successful on Kickstarter is one thing, having social proof in the form of professional funding (VC, angel, and/or otherwise) is another thing. After all, it's easier to get 10,000 people to give you $100 than it is for one person to give you $1 million. I am strongly opposed to the "raise money now, make money later" approach to startups and wholeheartedly believe that it is possible to build a software startup by bootstrapping. That said (and this might just be due to my inexperience with hardware development), I don't know that it's possible to build a successful hardware business that requires significant capital outlay to get started without outside funding. Are these things profitable at the $99 price point? If not, where is the cash going to come from to mass produce these. Is 10-100k purchases enough to swing a Series A, even if those 10-100k were sold at or below cost? Kickstarter seems like a great way to sell small-batch, niche products, but not necessary any huge mainstream successes. All of it boils down to this: I used to like innovative products just because they're innovative, but I've seen too many "great" products burned by a lack of a viable business behind the product. If I'm going to commit to a product or service, I need to know that it will be around for the long haul. I can no longer judge products on their own, I have to judge them based on their viability on the marketplace.

five_star 14y ago

I also believe android has potential in the market. I wonder why the thread seems to go against it.

kevingadd 14y ago

As an author of one of the comments that apparently has made people so upset, I guess I should respond. I don't see what your problem with my comment was. I provided a short list of clearly stated arguments why I believe their price point is unfounded and will impair their ability to ship a product, and why the price point (along with the marketing) suggests an incomplete knowledge of the problems they're attempting to address. Why does this matter? Two reasons: First, every large Kickstarter that takes money and fails to deliver will be an enormous hit to the viability of crowd-funding in general, and potentially increase the difficulties faced by other crowd-funded projects in terms of convincing backers to wait patiently for release. If something like the Ouya collects $3M in kickstarter funding and flames out violently, you can bet there will be lawyers lining up to file class action suits. Once this happens, the doors are probably open for harmful actions against all sorts of crowd-funded projects. This is all the more troublesome because game projects are in general troubled projects, so adding the spectre of legal threats isn't exactly going to improve things. Second, the degree to which the project feels slapped together or not well thought out suggests a potential to cause harmful effects on the development community and the way game players engage with it. While from a revenue perspective, the modern wave of free-to-play and Facebook games is a tremendous thing - making plenty of people rich - the social effects are yet to be fully understood. The mechanics heavily leveraged by these games are, to the extent they are understood by psychology and testing, not harmless and in some cases extremely harmful to the players over both the short and long term. The business models behind these games fundamentally encourage building around singular players spending to the limit of their ability (or beyond it), and use the kind of abusive terminology previously used in casinos and the development of slot machines. Now there are even companies trying to convince game developers to use their middleware to turn their games into actual slot machines where players gamble real money. Ouya's push is heavily predicated on it being about free to play games, the vast majority of which fall into the previously described category - destructive and built on psychological manipulation. The low price point means that Ouya would be the perfect choice for lower-income families that would otherwise not consider buying an expensive game console, and the emphasis on Android games being 'cheap' means that the majority of the games out there will be free downloads or a $1 purchase with the intent of getting players onto the microtransaction treadmill. I do not think this sort of future is good for anyone except investors (though in the short term, developers will benefit tremendously). So I suppose yes, You could say that I "don't get it": I don't get why you would decide to abuse your entire customer base for short term profit at the expense of long term market health. Some of the anger and dismissiveness in comments probably is, as you say, just about how it's android or about how it's open source or about how it was crowdfunded instead of VCd, or whatever. None of that is really a concern for me, as a person who doesn't own any Apple devices, hates OS X, uses an Android phone, develops open source projects, and hasn't ever been given a cent by venture capitalists or angel investors. I still think Ouya is probably going to be a bad thing unless the people running the project make a serious effort to curtail the potential for it to cause negative consequences for the industry as a whole.

checoivan 14y ago

I agree, people seem negative focusing too much in outermost layer like memory size, or that it isn't as powerful as an xbox. take a look at this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_retail_could_hit_sixyear_low_in_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_ret... The trend is game sales are down year over year. Studios are closing because massive multi million dollar productions are simply unsustainable. You see games being more expensive, have ads and sponsors on it, gameplay is cut down and sold as expensive downloadable content, and every game is using gimmicks like plastic toys to be able to sell a game copy for 99 or 150 bucks. And every year publishers have to one up in themselves like Charlie sheen going from a week long to a month long party. Another concrete example: Kingdom of Amalur's developer Studio 38. The game has an epic franchise, great reviews, strong first month sales. The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC. Development for consoles is very inaccesible. Even for XBox which uses DirectX and can be downloaded. How many of people you know that programmed a ps3 game in college? ' There has to be a reversal of this trends and a console like this seems like a step in the right direction. So far seems like only nintendo figured out it's all about delivering fun that people like, not who has the biggest processor. People doubt the 99 dollar price. Maybe it comes out being 150 or slightly more expensive, we don't know. It can definitively be cheap. Supposedly a Nexus 7 costs 184 dollars to make, 57 are just for the screen. Take out the screen, sensors,camera, battery, cut down memory...It sounds reasonable it could hit the price point.

laserDinosaur 14y ago
"The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC" Not exactly. They broke even if not made a little profit on Kingdom of Amalur, not bad for a new IP from a new company. What killed them was they were building a massive MMO on the side that, accordiding to the Giant Bomb guys, never had enough money to finish and was funded from quarter to quarter based on new investments. A huge gamble. When the mayor came out saying they were a poor investment, their money dried up overnight and nobody would touch them. So, with a partially built MMO and bills needing to be paid they shut their doors. (source - ramblings from the Giant Bomb podcast and E3 interviews with David Jaffe)