The OUYA (rhymes with booyah) is a new open-source Android-based console being funded independently on Kickstarter. At just $99 it’s not meant to compete with the Xbox 360 or PS3 but it can play many of the same games thanks to a Tegra3 quad-core processor.
“We’ve had a lot of questions about this, people asking whether or not Tegra 3 could handle the types of games that they want to play and we’ve been directing them to the Tegra 3 demo from NVIDIA,” founder Julie Uhrman told engadet. “People familiar with the Tegra 3 in today’s mobile devices need to remember that we won’t have to balance (and trade) power to increase battery life. So we can crank up the performance of these chips.”
The list of available games will be further enhanced by a partnership with OnLive, a could gaming service which circumvents the need for a powerful gaming machine by streaming games online.
“We are pleased to announce that OnLive will be available on OUYA at launch, extending and building on our commitment to make the best games available to everyone, everywhere,” General Manager Bruce Grove announced on the OnLive blog.
The OnLive game library currently has about 300 titles, which is significantly more than dozen or so Xbox 360 and PS3 had at their launch.
The service will also make good on OUYA’s promise of a “free to play” model. OnLive offers free demos up to 30 minutes of each game. Players that purchase the full game can pick up where they left off on any of their supported devices including PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.
OUYA is scheduled for release in March 2013 but the first in line to get one will be backers who pledged at least $99 on the Kickstarter campaign, which ends August 9 2012.
