For those that don’t keep up with the gaming world, today is the press day for the E3 conference which is taking place in LA this week. At E3, you’ll hear announcements from just about every gaming company – in fact Sony is scheduled to start their press conference shortly. Razer and Ouya have a pretty interesting announcement this morning, themselves. Razer has just bought Ouya.
For those that don’t remember, Ouya was the gaming console that ran Android on an NVIDIA Tegra 3. It never really took off, even though it had hundreds of games that were developed and optimized for the console. The Ouya was on Kickstarter, and did pretty well, actually. It then went to retail for $99, which isn’t bad for a gaming console, especially one like the Ouya. It finally launched in mid-2013. Recently, the Ouya team had been focusing more on software than the hardware side of their business. They made a game store, and a user inferface that was available for third-party game consoles. Additionally they also introduced a subscription-service, that would allow users to play a variety of games for an annual fee.
With the launch of Android TV, and companies like Razer and NVIDIA jumping on board, it pretty much killed whatever momentum Ouya had going for it. Razer launched their Forge TV, and NVIDIA just recently launched their Shield TV in the past few weeks. While Android TV is mostly for TV and streaming services, Google has built it for gaming. And it’s very easy for companies like Razer to put out a set-top box and instantly have tons of games available, thanks to the many developers submitting games to Google Play.
Right now, there are no details on how much Razer paid for Ouya, or any of the other terms about this purchase. However, Mesa Global has confirmed it, and was the advisor for Ouya over the sale. We should learn more about what this acquisition means for both Ouya and Razer in the future, in the next few days if not sooner. Make sure you stick to Android Headlines for all the details.