NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Ouya reportedly in talks to sell to Razer
Android-based microconsole Ouya burst onto the gaming scene in 2012 after a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, earning over $8.5 million from tens of thousands of backers, but the early excitement quickly died and left the company with lukewarm sales figures. Ouya went on to raise $15 million in Series A funding, and earlier this year it received a $10 million investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, but it seems that was not enough to rescue the company.
News broke in April that Ouya was desperately looking to sell, and according to new reports, game hardware and peripheral maker Razer Inc might be interested.
According to TechCrunch, sources claim that Razer is currently in talks to buy Ouya. Razer responded to the rumors in a vague statement that neither confirmed nor denied the speculation.
“Razer has always been supportive of Ouya, in particular, their work toward building an open platform for Android gaming in the living room and the empowerment of developers, especially indie developers, all over the world,” a spokesperson for Razer said. “However, we do not comment on speculation or rumors and will reach out if and when we have substantive information to share.”
Are microconsoles even worth it?
While microconsoles offer better portability and lower cost than full-sized consoles like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, they also have weaker hardware and less impressive game libraries. Ouya boasts over 1,000 game in its library, but many are forgettable mobile games that do not exactly sell a system the same way games like Halo or Mario Kart do.
And because most Ouya titles are cross-platform Android games, there are no specific reasons to buy that system over some of its competitors, like Amazon Fire or the upcoming Nvidia Shield set-top box.
Still, Ouya’s successful Kickstarter campaign and funding round show that someone out there is interested in the system, and a company like Razer could might be able to rescue the product. Then again, if a company like Nintendo is having trouble selling its console, Ouya might not be long for this world.
Image credit: Evan Amos (Public Domain)
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