Check out our review of the Ouya Android-based gaming console.
Tim Schafer spent ten years trying to get his studio Double Fine established on consoles. The studio’s pedigree was in PC gaming, but the money to be made was on PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox. So years, millions of dollars, and much sweat and tears were spent making Psychonauts, Brutal Lenged, Costume Quest, and others, all for meager returns. No wonder that Tim Schafer said in December that his studio is considering abandoning consoles in favor of PCs forever. Double Fine isn’t giving up consoles entirely, though. It may leave the industry’s biggest players, but one of its upcoming games is coming to the Android-powered OUYA.
At the D.I.C.E. Summit this week, OUYA boss Julie Uhrman talked up the large number of games coming to the device when it releases this spring. Hundreds of games are in the works according to Uhrman, including exclusive versions of games like Final Fantasy III by Square-Enix.
Amongst those exclusives is the Kickstarter phenomenon Double Fine Adventure. Double Fine raised more than $3 million for a new Schafer-penned adventure game in March 2012, with PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android versions promised at the time. Since an Android version was already in the works, an OUYA version of the game should be easy to produce, but it’s surprising to hear that the new device will be the only living room console to get the game.
Double Fine backed up Uhrman’s statements, confirming to Kotaku that the still unnamed adventure game—now codenamed Reds—will be a console exclusive for OUYA on launch day.
Launch day is an important distinction in this case, though. Double Fine has released a plethora of exclusives in the past. Its cult favorite platformer Psychonauts, for example, started life as a Microsoft-funded Xbox exclusive at the beginning of last decade before ultimately getting picked up by Majesco and ported over to both the PlayStation 2 and PC.
The open nature of OUYA may be what Double Fine’s been missing in the console business. “We’d still like to be active in that space, we care about consoles, but unless they open things up a lot more like what we have on Steam… if they opened things up more it would be a more friendly place from our perspective,” said Schafer in December, “We’re talking to them about this stuff, and you know, they hear us. They’re big companies and they can’t make changes overnight, but I think they’re taking that stuff into consideration. We’ll have to see what happens.”
