Tech Talk: Major player

IF your children like to use the TV to play computer games the process will almost certainly involve one of the boxes turned out by the huge corporations of Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Between them, they have the whole business sewn up.

At least, they had until now. Because the wraps are about to come off a console that gives gaming back to the gamers.

The Ouya (pronounced Oo-ya) will cost £65 – about half as much as the Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, and unlike any of those, basic games should come free. To say that the industry is worried by this development is something of an understatement: popular titles like Call of Duty cost up to £40 and the idea of giving them away is anathema. Nevertheless, Ouya’s idea is to source games from a pool of independent developers who have no hope of getting their work to a wide audience at present.

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Best-selling games like Final Fantasy won’t be excluded completely; their developers are keen to work with Ouya, but will want to retain their margins. Although the console has yet to roll off the production line, the early prototypes are promising. The main cube, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, sits underneath your TV, and you interact with the games using boomerang-shaped controllers which connect wirelessly.

Under the hood is Google’s Android operating system, as found in smartphones. This represents a big departure for a gaming machines, which have traditionally used proprietary software owned and controlled by the console manufacturers. But Android is open source, which means that anyone can mess about with the code legally and with Google’s blessing. It’s also why they will be able to sell it so cheaply.

What’s more, users will be allowed to take the box to pieces and upgrade components without risk of voiding their warranty. So the era of the pimped up gaming console is about to dawn.

The Ouya will play videos and music as well as games, streaming content from your home network to your TV and hi-fi – which makes it quite a compelling proposition as a home media centre.

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It is being developed with money not from banks and venture capitalists but from gamers themselves; 63,000 of them put $8.5m through a fund-raising website called Kickstarter – another open source project. If it works it could be Game Over for the expensive cycle of console and title releases controlled by a few major players.