Following the announcement that Razer is buying Ouya, the folks behind the purchase have expressed what they see as the future of the Ouya to be. They stated clearly that the Ouya has been a great console, a wonderful place for indies to cut their teeth and a great console for gamers to compliment their gaming catalog.
However, they feel that there is much more for the console in its future as a part of Razer. “We feel the Ouya didn’t go far enough. It can do so much more,” an exec at Razer said. With this new acquisition, Razer has stated that they want to do more to attract the core gaming demographic. “One of the Ouya’s failings was that it did not attract enough attention from the hardcore gaming crowd. We want to change that.”
How do they plan on doing this? Well, the first thing is power. The Ouya didn’t have enough power to attract the attention of today’s hardcore gamers. With only 1 Gig of RAM and a Tegra 3 processor, it couldn’t display the type of resolutions and graphical detail most gamers are use to. Razer plans to re-engineer the architecture to support 8 Gigs of RAM, a custom 8-core CPU, and 2Gig NVidia GPU. The hardcore gamer also demanded more storage and physical media. To satisfy this, Razer will install a 1 TB harddrive with a 250 GB SSD as the primary drive. They will also install a Blu-ray disc drive for installing larger games. Finally, the hardcore gamers just never could get used to the controller for the Ouya. To satisfy the needs of these gamers, Razer will pack in a keyboard and a 5-button mouse.
With all of these hardware modifications, it also became necessary to make updates to the core OS that runs the games software. “The Android OS was simply not designed to power these components,” the Razer exec exclaimed. To properly run this new hardware, Razer had to switch from Android OS to Windows 10. Of course with this change, most of the games native to the Ouya are no longer compatible. So Razer is courting big game developers to launch AAA games on this newly redesigned Ouya console.
The last change is the price. While Razer tried to stick to the Ouya’s low price model for hardware, they just couldn’t. With the new hardware redesign and OS, Razer states this new version of the Ouya will launch at an $1,000 price point.
Finally, Razer announced the new name. They call it the Ouya PC.
