Almost two weeks after their Kickstarter campaign began, the Ouya has already generated its first exclusive title. Robert Bowling, president of Robotoki and formerly Infinity Ward’s Creative Strategist has announced an episodic prequel to their upcoming next-gen zombie apocalypse game Human Element. In the fourth update to their Kickstarter, the Ouya team gave Bowling an opportunity to explain why they’ve decided to make the game and what future Ouya owners should expect from it. As the Ouya gains more hype will this be the first of many developers to take a chance and develop a title for the would-be console?
While Human Element will be released onto the so-far-unannounced next-gen consoles in 2015 the Ouya version will be an episodic prequel that is released much sooner. Bowling says the decision to create an episodic game for the Ouya was driven by requests from the community to see some Human Element content sooner. As the next-gen version of Human Element takes place 35 years after the beginning of the apocalypse, the Ouya version will episodically fill in the back-story before next-gen version is released. This will give Ouya owners not only an exclusive game, but an exclusive perspective into the next-gen version.
It’s great to see some member of the development community come together for a common goal, in this case Robotoki’s Bowling and the Ouya team. But what I’m more interested in is how fast they were able to come together and make an announcement. Based on their update video, Bowling seems to have had little knowledge of the console until it was announced via Kickstarter. Yet, two weeks later there’s already an announcement on a new title. Ultimately it will be the game that decides whether or not this was a good decision, and this could just be plain-old hype, but so far business without publishers sure does seem a lot faster.
I’m sure this won’t be the only title announced for the Ouya before its Kickstarter has ended, but this might be the only one attached to an existing next-gen title. However I do see that many of their developer rewards have been purchased, meaning some of their backers are going to start announcing titles as some point. The Ouya team did promise to promote games from those who donate roughly $700 bucks or more to the project, so there’s no telling what type of games to expect. This means that there will most likely be a large volume of titles for the Ouya at some point, whether or not they’re any good remains to be seen.
