Game streaming service OnLive partners with Ouya

Game streaming service OnLive has recently confirmed that they are partnering with the wildly successful Kickstarter project Ouya, the $99 console and the streaming service will be available at launch. The Ouya project has been attracting a huge amount of attention from the gaming world, and OnLive has now confirmed that it will be involved with Ouya.

In a statement to TechRadar, OnLive’s general manager in the UK, Bruce Grove confirmed the move, “When OnLive first heard about Ouya, we were excited to see console gaming becoming more available and open”.

"Like OUYA, we came to gaming with a new vision for making top-quality gaming accessible to more people, and we continue to look for ways to expand on that vision”, Grove continued, “OUYA is rethinking the console business, making waves by using standard technology to make gaming for your living room accessible, affordable and more innovative than ever. In OnLive's case, we pioneered a groundbreaking, cloud-based system that instantly delivers games to any device on demand. 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."

The Ouya, now with OnLive!

The Ouya Kickstarter started earlier this month. The team working on the Ouya has a dream of changing how the current console market works, where console manufacturers have a tight leash over what games can and can’t be on their system. Julie Uhrman, founder of Ouya – who has had executive experience at IGN, Vivendi Universal, and GameFly – thinks it’s about time the console market finally learned something from platforms such as the iOS, about new business strategies. “It’s ironic. All the growth in gaming is moving to mobile platforms, [and] we’re seeing a lot of AAA developers leaving their console shops to go to mobile. Yet three out of every four dollars is still spent in the living room, a majority of gaming time is still spent on the TV, and if you survey any gamer they’ll tell you their No. 1 platform is the TV", Uhrman said.

Ouya had started out with a goal of getting $950,000 on Kickstarter, but they have crossed that goal by almost a sixfold margin now, having gathered roughly $5,600,000. Now that they have the money they need, Ouya are in talks with Nvidia for maximising the potential of the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip they’re using, according to a post on Ouya’s Kickstarter page.

The Ouya has the hardware specs you would expect from a console that costs $99. It uses the same kind of quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor that powers Google’s Nexus 7 and Microsoft’s Surface tablets, along with 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of built-in storage. This will let the system run decently complex 3D games at 1080p, but the graphics won’t be very good compared to the Xbox360 or the PS3.

As of the time of writing this, the Ouya Kickstarter still has 12 days to go.