14 DAY TRIAL // The team in charge of the Ouya game console announces that it is receiving an investment from the Alibaba Group, which will allow it to continue development in the future and to bring its hardware and software to Chinese gamers, partly by delivering some of the games on the YunOS platform.
That means that the more than 1,000 titles offered on the open platform will be initially delivered on the Tmall set top box in China.
The Alibaba device connects directly to a television set and can be used to shop for products, watch movies and television shows, and play games including Street Fighter IV and Winning Eleven 2014.
Ouya is known for its open nature and it will be interesting to see how the company will work with the closed ecosystem that exists on the Chinese entertainment market.
Julie Uhrman, the founder and chief executive officer of Ouya, states, “Markets, like China, without the baggage of the U.S. console market, could be the game console leaders in ten years. That's where Ouya wants to be.”
The device was launched in 2013 and allows developers to get access to an open hardware platform on which a variety of games can be created by both small teams and big developers.
The Chinese market might be perfect for Ouya
Recently, the Community Party-dominated government in China announced that it was lifting a long-standing ban against the sale of home consoles and video games associated with them in the country.
Ouya is cheap and offers a lot of games for low prices or even for free, which means that it could be well suited to the Chinese market, where at the moment the biggest success is linked to free-to-play experiences offered on the PC.
Alibaba will offer more details on how it plans to market the device in the coming months.
Sony and Microsoft are also aiming to take advantage of the new position of the Chinese government.
The Xbox One is already available on the market, but its sales have been limited so far.
The PlayStation 4 was set to arrive in early January, but the launch was postponed indefinitely and the delay seems to be linked to problems with the video games that Sony wanted to offer.
The Chinese government, through the Ministry of Culture, is still asserting a right to censor any entertainment content launched in the country.