OUYA, the open, $99 Android game console, raised $15 million in new funding. Those funds more than double the company's resources, after the mega-successful Kickstarter that raised $8.6 million last summer.
OUYA founder and CEO Julie Uhrman said the funding will help support the growth of the game developer community, along with the impending launch in retail stores.
That launch has been pushed from June 4 to June 25, Uhrman said, to accommodate a larger demand from retailers and so the company could first satisfy all of OUYA's Kickstarter backers and pre-orders. OUYAs are currently shipping to the 40,000 who pre-ordered via Kickstarter, with some yet to receive their console.
OUYA will be available at Amazon, Best Buy, Gamestop, Target, and GAME in the United Kingdom. Uhrman confirmed it would appear on store shelves as well as online, although she couldn't specify how many units stores would receive.
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Additionally, game industry veteran and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) General Partner Bing Gordon will join OUYA's board of directors to advise the company. Gordon was the chief creative officer of Electronic Arts until he left for KPCB in 2008 and was with the company since 1982. KPCB, with participation from the Mayfield Fund, NVIDIA, Shasta Ventures, and Occam Partners, led this latest funding round.
"Once I heard about OUYA, I had to get involved. To me, the OUYA is a disruptor. It also aligns with my life's work about making cool games for everyone," Gordon said. "I was really excited to see hall of fame game designers like Brian Fargo, Tim Schafer, and Minecraft's Notch looking at OUYA and saying 'This could be a place where we could continue our life's work.' I also think about people in world-class university programs being able to buy a game console for $99 to program in their dorm rooms, and it's incredibly freeing."
OUYA appeals to investors because of how Kickstarter works, Gordon said. The company has to focus on developing marketing at the same time as the product, and a successful project will already have an interested public.
"Most digital media creators come to venture and show what they are going to do via a PowerPoint," Gordon said. "They don't show a prototype, media usage, or a website or marketing. They don't show how the product is going to attract customers."
Instead, he said, the OUYA team was thinking more like a movie studio or toy manufacturer, which create slices and commercials to prove products are worth moving forward. A great video is required to snag Kickstarter backers and show them why your product is worth backing.
Gordon said OUYA still will have to worry about capturing an audience as it grows and it will require the "killer app" of great games to support them.
"The OUYA needs to be a miracle to its developers and early adopters, and it needs to establish itself as a miracle before it moves to mass market."
"Currently, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft expect to sell 5 [million] to 10 million consoles the first year. Those launches open to a wide audience like a Hollywood movie, instead of like an arts film, which starts small and then has to grow its fans," Gordon said. "OUYA will have to figure out how to open like that arts film."
Uhrman said she thinks OUYA is on track to do something like that, with 12,000 developers who have downloaded the SDK. There have also been several exclusive games announced for OUYA, including Portal developer Kim Swift's project Soul Fjord.