Dev Consoles are shipping on time!

Hey OUYAs,

Feast your eyes on this...

Our office OUYA – the latest prototype we’ve been putting through the paces every day (and most nights) as we jam toward shipping you our product.

Take a moment to reflect, and then keep reading. We have a lot to fill you in on.

HARDWARE

To the hundreds of developers who backed us through Kickstarter to get their hands on our advance dev consoles: Mark your calendars! On December 28, they leave the factory and should arrive within a couple of days (we’ve heard that Turkey and Russia might take a bit longer). Yes, we are shipping these to you on time, as promised.

The dev consoles are an early version of the OUYA console and controller designed for developers to test their games on OUYA. Our Kickstarter developers are the first to get a crack at ‘em! We’re psyched to have you on board, and we can’t wait to see what pours from your brain!

Of course, when the final consoles ship, EVERY OUYA will be a dev console. We told you that already. What we didn’t tell you was that the advance dev consoles you ordered are pretty special – you’ll know what I mean when you open yours. They’re rare drops. :P

The dev consoles aren’t cheap for us to make. And we heard from many of you during the Kickstarter campaign that you simply couldn’t afford one. We wish we could just give them away, and we decided for a few of you – we’d do just that! But you have to work for ‘em...check out our Dev Console Giveaway for more details.

SOFTWARE

Our eyes have been glued to our computer screens building out the OUYA Development Kit (ODK) – tools that do everything from making sure the controller can talk to the game to ensuring that game developers will have the proper tools to get paid.

This early version of the ODK is being tested now. When the dev consoles ship to gamemakers, all developers—even those who may not have their hands on a dev console—will be able to access a web portal where they can download the ODK, get help on our forums, and eventually upload games to OUYA.

While jamming on the ODK, we’ve also had a team focused on the user interface. This involves optimizing Android Jelly Bean to play games on a big screen and spending time understanding the best ways gamers can search for and discover new games. It’s still in development, but it looks great, and the advance dev consoles include a sneak peek...

MEET JULESKANE

That’s me – or how you’ll know me on OUYA anyway!

“That’s great for Julie, but what about my username?”

You’ll have your answer soon enough! By December 25, we’ll email each of you a link to activate your account. For those of you who responded to our survey about preferred usernames, you’ll be able to confirm your choice. For the handful of popular names that had conflicts, we broke the tie(s) by honoring whomever backed OUYA first on Kickstarter. And, if any of you didn’t respond—or didn’t get your preferred username—you can choose a name when December 25 rolls around. Happy Holidays! :)

As we get closer to launch, we’ll be in touch about things like double-checking your shipping address in case you’ve been on the move. But for now, at least one of you can rest easy knowing that you are the only “TurboPianoCat” on OUYA – beating out at least a dozen wannabe TPCs!

Until then!

JulesKane

P.S. Many of you have continued to support us by nominating OUYA for Crunchies Awards in the categories of “Best New Startup” and “Best Hardware Startup” – thank you! If any of the rest of you would like to join in on the action, you can nominate OUYA right now!

http://www.kickstarter.com