New, improved versions of Ouya to be released every year

Ouya founder and CEO Julie Uhrman has announced that her company's $99 Android-based gaming console will be refreshed every year to keep up with...

Nikhil Subramaniam|Feb 07, 2013, 19:31:14 IST

Ouya founder and CEO Julie Uhrman has announced that her company's $99 Android-based gaming console will be refreshed every year to keep up with the developments in the fast-paced mobile hardware industry.

Ouya started life as a Kickstarter project and will be sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and GameStop from June onwards. However, Uhrman told The Verge in an interview that her company is thinking much farther ahead than June. Uhrman said that her team is planning on releasing a new version of the Ouya each and every year.

Uhrman said, "Our plan is to have a yearly refresh of Ouya where we leverage the best-performing chips and take advantage of falling component prices to create the best experience we can at the $99 price point. If we could do it for less than $99, we would.” The controller has since been revised to be more friendly to colorblind users.

The controller has since been revised to be more friendly to colorblind users.

The Ouya console with its colour-blind-friendly controller.

The report states, “The Ouya's Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset is no slouch, (but) there's already a Tegra 4 inbound, and at least one developer is already questioning the Ouya's hardware limitations. But now there's no telling there won't be a Tegra 4-based Ouya next year.”

Even so, Uhrman told the website that her console will be slightly more powerful than a comparable Tegra 3 tablet since it sips power directly from the outlet and doesn’t need to conserve battery. Secondly, it is not as limited specs-wise as some would like to believe, since its internal memory can be supplemented with an external hard drive using the USB port.

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Uhrman also mentioned that company would be continuously improving its games inventory. To avoid the possibility of the Ouya store being filled up with a bunch of low-quality games, Uhrman said that a review would be conducted to filter out copyright-infringing content, malware and pornography. But there are no more restrictions beyond that. "You can be a triple-A publisher, or you can be an independent developer who hasn't released his first game yet, or you can be a student who is just learning the tricks of the trade, and all of you can develop games," she said.

The Android-based Ouya console went on pre-order on its official website yesterday. The console comes with one controller and will cost $99.99 (about Rs 5,303). An extra controller is priced at $49.99 (around Rs 2,651). The inclusion of the touchpad makes the controller premium, according to Uhrman. The company started shipping the developer version of console last December.