Reading about the OUYA was something: if it delivers what it promises, it is going to breathe a new life into console gaming. To think, a system for only 100 dollars that anyone who owned it already had the SDK to make games for the system.
The fact is barriers to entry into game development seem to get lower every year. There is huge indie support for PC, there is XBLA, and smartphones have opened up huge avenues for people who want to make and distribute games.
Making it easy to make games is great, it will allow for a larger number of good, worthwhile games out there and we will all have better play experiences because of it. But there is still the concern of what it means for the indie guy, the small team who wants to just scrape buy and bring out a decent game to the public. That is to say if the accessibility of game development is able to turn making games into a widespread hobby, the supply could overpower the demand and we might see a lot of indies go under and leave the industry. We love making games but not everyone can make a living off of it; hopefully we are not pushing ourselves into a boom and bust—we need to know what direction the world is going.
OUYA is going to be big, but what kind of splash is it going to make? What is this pool that is gaming like today? Still there seems a sharp divide between the indie and the mainstream—will the OUYA just become a toy for the independents to play and share their own games, withdrawn and resistant to anything considered too mainstream? That is not the future I want to see; perhaps we will see a more open audience in console gaming, perhaps we will stop seeing so sharp a divide between “AAA” and “indie” and their differences won’t guide or restrict the market. Why must we differentiate the two so drastically? Hopefully in this near future there won’t be a need to.
So maybe this new openness will make it more competitive. We would still see games that are better than ever, but there is the concern that it might make it harder for game development to be a full-time job. Hopefully, this is not going to be an issue. Maybe the answer could be found by looking at other industries. With all of the video editing tools available and youtube have we seen any decline in movies, television, or independent films? Honestly I don’t know for sure how these things might have been affected, but I think we can all agree youtube has been a good thing.
-GR
