Why we shouldn't set our expectations too high for the Ouya.

Every gamer who backed the Ouya kickstarter in the project in the beginning must have all been thinking something like, "Finally! We get to just make the console we want instead of some big company deciding for us!" Except, that's not exactly true. This strange thing happened when they went from scrappy kickstarter project, to now, one of the most successful projects ever. A big company has emerged that is very new to this arena and arguably not very good at it. Woops..

So what's so bad about the Ouya? Well, I've got nothing against the Ouya in particular, but we have to recognize it for what it is:
A first attempt console with a low budget from a new unproven company.

The operating system is based on the Android OS, designed for touch screens. In this commenters opinion, Android doesn't even do that well. It's great that a viable alternative to iOS exists, but come on, is anyone really going to say Android is a better OS for building games on? It's an impossible mess to deal with all the different versions and screen sizes. The emulator doesn't really represent what an actual device will do. All the devices are significantly different from each other, in crazy unpredictable ways (like one that goes out to a tv set for example.)

I really do hope the Ouya does well, and maybe in a few years we'll have an Android based console experience. While I don't think Android is the best choice, a unified embeded OS is needed, and Android is the best option for now.

So this is probably the (meh) beginnings of what will become a great standard we can base console technology on. There is much to be hopeful for, but not today.. maybe in... 3 years or so.