NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Crowdfunded game company Ouya is looking for a buyer to pay off debts
Ouya Inc, the creator of an Android-based microconsole, generated a lot of hype after its incredibly successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter that raised over $8.5 million, but after all the buzz around the “new kind of video game console” died down, the company ran into some serious financial troubles and is now looking for a buyer as soon as possible.
In addition to the money from Kickstarter, Ouya also raised $15 million in Series A funding in 2013 from companies like Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield Fund, Occam Partners, Shasta Ventures and NVIDIA. The game console maker later received an undisclosed amount of venture debt from TriplePoint Capital.
Ouya was also granted a slight reprieve in January when it received a $10 million investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Limited, but now Ouya is so far in debt that it is desperately looking for a buyer.
“Given our debtholder’s timeline, the process will be quick,” Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman wrote in a confidential memo acquired by Fortune. “We are looking for expressions of interest by the end of this month.”
While the open, hackable nature of Ouya was praised by supporters, many people also criticized the system’s low computing power and lack of premium game titles.
Ouya tried to bolster its library of games by offering to match certain milestone levels for games on Kickstarter, but the console maker required lengthy exclusivity deals in exchange, and game developers were reluctant to limit their content to a system with such a low adoption rate. According to a 2014 report by GameInformer, the most popular game on Ouya had only sold around 7,000 copies within the first year of the console’s release.
Now, Ouya needs to find a buyer if it wants to survive.
“Our focus now is trying to recover as much investor capital as possible,” Uhrman wrote in the memo. “We believe we’ve built something real and valuable. I continue to read the tweets and emails of our fans who play OUYA every day, and our catalog is now over 1,000 apps and 40,000 developers. We have the largest library of Android content for the TV (still more than Amazon) — hells ya!”
Image credit: Evan Amos (Public Domain)
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