Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 07.23.2012 @ 5:00 pm
Why move Rocksauce’s Spinferno game to OUYA? What about this console has you so excited?
Before OUYA became so popular on Kickstarter, there really wasn’t a viable gaming platform for the Android operating system. iOS has held onto the gaming marketing with the iPad, which has always attracted more users than Android tablets. OUYA allows independent developers like ourselves to make games for a familiar software and let them be played on the big screen in your home. XBox Live has a couple of hoops you have to jump through if you want your games to be available there, whereas OUYA will be just like making an Android game. The controller will even have a touchscreen, so your controls can be the same across platform if you want them to be. Then there’s the low cost of $99, which means that any gamer will be able to pick one of these up for a cheap price. We think a lot of gamers are going to purchase one of these because it’ll give them access to games from interesting and unique developers who aren’t able or willing to make $20 million dollar games for other platforms. I think OUYA could be a killer platform for the Android and it has the potential to shift how mobile games are created, putting the emphasis on Android instead of iOS.
When we initially launched our Spinferno campaign, all eyes were on iOS, but all of this changed in a matter of days. By the time Spinferno comes out, OUYA may be poised to become a dominant gaming platform. Also, OUYA is willing to help push and publicize our game and help get it out there to the gaming community. We’re very community focused. We love helping out other people. Here on Tapsauce, we talk about tons of games and apps that we didn’t make, but love to put out there simply because they’re good products. We love working with another company that wants to push others’ products. That’s far more in line with the Rocksauce ideal set, especially compared to Apple, which can be a crapshoot when it comes to getting your app out there.
Some developers are hesitant to get involved with OUYA because they’re not sure if it’ll have an audience. What would you say to get them on board?
I’d just tell them that this is Android and that this will be just like developing for Android. If OUYA was a standalone console, we never would have made this decision. If it was a brand new operating system that we had to learn, we wouldn’t have gone for it. That would’ve been too risky. But in this case, the same game that we make for OUYA can be available for Android phones and tablets. There’s a deficit for games on Android compared to iOS. Most developers (like us, previously) have gravitated toward Apple products, but this is a chance for us to be involved in helping shift the balance toward a better experience for gamers. Anyone making a game should consider the coolest experience for their players. What’s going to feel the coolest? That should be the priority. You can’t always wait for something to be popular to jump on. You have to make the decision to be a risk taker. OUYA has everything in place and considering the money it has raised, it looks pretty damn popular already!
If OUYA is everything you want it to be, how do you see it changing the gaming landscape?
There will be more homebrew games! This is the democratization of gamemaking, much like how we saw the democratization of filmmaking awhile back. In the film world, studios are already self-producing a handful of films a year and buying tons more from the festival and indie circuit, so you’ll start to see that happen more with games. We’ve already had a publisher contact us about publishing Spinferno and we haven’t even made the game yet! Game developers should embrace this change. This means we don’t have to invest millions and millions of dollars to make a game for the “major” consoles. Sure, if you want to make something like Assassin’s Creed or Infinity Blade you’ll have to spend a lot of money, but gamers are just after a fun experience. Look at XBox Live or the PlayStation arcade or the Nintendo 3DS, which allows you to download indie games straight from the developers. All of these already exist and this is just a platform dedicated to nothing but that!