Ouya to remove free trial requirement in April
Santiago explains Ouya's advantage over self-publishing on other consoles.
Ouya head of developer relations, Kellee Santiago, has confirmed that Ouya will be removing its requirement for devs to include a free demo for all titles on the console come April.
The announcement came during a GDC panel attended by Eurogamer. When asked if this was a highly demanded feature, Santiago told us that it was and that certain genres don't lend themselves well to demos. "The requests were coming from them that it was restrictive for certain kinds of content that they were interested in bringing to Ouya," she told us in an interview. "Not every genre lends itself to having a demo or a tracked section or microtransactions."
For example, she said that the console manufacturer would be bringing text-based Twine games to the platform and was in talks with prolific indie developer Anna Anthropy about porting some of her more controversial works.
Santiago further confirmed that Broken Age is coming to the platform with six month console exclusivity. When asked when this would happen, she said the first episode would be out around the time the second episode hits Steam, while the second episode will follow at an unannounced time.
When asked about Ouya's advantage over the competition now that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo also allow self-publishing, Santiago noted that Ouya is a more "iterative" platform than its competitors and lends itself to a more experimental development philosophy.
"We're serving an audience that wants a more iterative platform," she said. "That's evolved into incorporating players into their alphas and betas. And Ouya is a great platform to support that, because it's so easy to publish on and so easy to update. So you can quickly put up new versions and get feedback on it in a way that you can't really do on consoles."
"There are so many indie developers that want to make a lot of money, get very famous, make a living, but also developers that want to experiment with new ideas, that want to create art outside of a commercial paradigm. That want to just make games, because the activity of making games is an extension of their hobby of playing games. Ouya's perfect for that because I can have an idea today, I could prototype it tonight, then I could have it on Ouya tomorrow. There's really no other way to do that."