OUYA and Steam Box are going to make a dent, but it's going to be because of the economics of it more than anything else. Both Steam and OUYA are software that

OUYA and Steam Box are going to make a dent, but it's going to be because of the economics of it more than anything else. Both Steam and OUYA are software that rely on companies like Apple, Samsung, nVidia, AMD, and Intel to spend billions of dollars on hardware R&D and they can just run their software stores on top of them. That makes the economics of putting out a box that hooks up to a TV and plays games a lot better. For instance, with OUYA they can spend say $20-50 in parts to build the latest ARM box and turn around and sell it for $100. The total cost of R&D to design and build the OUYA is probably less than $10 million. There is already an existing pool of Android software with an average selling price of less than $5 a unit. It will probably launch with hundreds or thousands of games on day one. Compare that to the PS4 which will launch with probably 5-10 games and have maybe 100 games year one, and each game will cost $60 (or more). OUYA - $100 + < $5 per game. PS4 - probably $400 + $60 per game. OUYA - say $10 million to develop/produce PS4 - say > $1 billion to develop (PS3 CPU alone cost $2 billion to develop) In short, the economics for both development of hardware and selling of software have shifted down so dramatically that it is going to hurt the PS4, XBox 3, and Wii U substantially. It already had a huge impact on the mobile space. SteamBox is going to be basically the same story only at a $200-300 price point and with $5-20 games. Why on earth would people (especially parents) pay $400 for a console and $60 for a game when they could pay $100 for a console and $5 for a game. You can buy a lot of OUYA games for the price of a next gen (or even current gen) console. The market for $60 games won't go away, but it will shrink fast. Linux is a big contributor obviously, but it's as much about the hardware economics as it is the software.