Gadgetory

hi I'm Adi with the verge and we're here at GDC 2013 in San Francisco we're here any of bahar's design studio fuse project one of the things he's been working on lately is the Ouya console we're going to talk to E as CEO Julie Uhrman so this is our first real look at the initial version of the Ouya console interface that's going to be going out to Kickstarter backers and it's really minimalist yeah we wanted me to be simple minimalistic we really thought about gamers we wanted to be intuitive for anybody that picked up a controller and to get you into what's most important to us it's about playing games and making games and you'll see on our home screen there's really only four categories play is everything that you've downloaded discover is where you find great content and games to download make is where you get to learn about making games so you get to have a direct relationship with developers if you're a developer it's where you can upload build so that you can test and try things out before you launch them into the Ouya store which is our discover and manages just our settings and what about things like streaming video booyah supports streaming video streaming audio we've already announced the relationships with vivo and iHeartRadio Flixter is coming oh yeah we support XBMC in Plex so if you want to make new your entertainment Media Center you can tell me how the store works we call our store discover it's where you'll go to discover great games the way that you will experience and find games it's really based on two things one is we will have content and games that we feature so games that we love Kelly Santiago who runs the developer relations for us is curating the store so today we've got three featured channels that can grow on a daily by weekly monthly basis we're also going to look for external people to help us curate the store so developer friends and universities and we really want people to discover great content we also have our genre tags so you can find games based on genre we dig deeper into games then sort of the top level genres so we want to be we want to qualify these games as much as possible so in addition to allowing a developer to tag games we'll go in and tag games with genres that are more representative of what is really happening so you can see the words like fight and short on time and we really want to make it as descriptive as possible and then the last way that you find games is really based on our algorithm which is based on fun and what makes a fun game and to us that is engagement so how long have you played a game or how many times have you played a game in a certain period of time and we want those games to surface and that's that's what the sandbox is for right exactly every new game the latest games goes into the sandbox you can play all these games and download them you can search by them by name but for them to get out of the sandbox and actually be discoverable within a jean or a featured category they have to be really like they have to be fun games and so once they get a certain metric they'll be ejected out and you'll be able to you know discover them just through basic navigation of the discover store we also think this is great for developers because it really encourages them to really promote their games and let their audience know that this exists and go ahead and find it and play it and if you like it thumb it up and and get it out of the sandbox and all these games have some kind of free tier but how do you tell what's going to how you're supposed to pay after this every game is free to try that's really the only rule on you is that it has to be for you to try but our games can be micro transactionally based or you could have a demo and then you have to unlock the whole version I mean you already have a game today that's donation based so you'll learn about the monetization elements when you're playing the game so how much is actually in here right now in the catalog and how much is that going to change by law the catalogue changes every single day we have north of 60 titles already we are seeing games from every different type of developer from triple-a to independents and newcomers we've never even seen before we've already had developers that have iterated on their game multiple times but as far as our launch in June it's hard to tell I mean we think there could be hundreds of games so who have you been talking to when you're trying to get developers to make and you mentioned a lot of them at Isis one in five who have not actually made a game yeah I mean a lot of the developers were seeing our experience game developers who never built an Android game before and we're seeing game developers that have never built a game before but have aspired to and now because they can bring games to the television via now they're really starting to build the games thanks for talking to us Julie and once again we're here with oh yeah its shipping out to Kickstarter backers today and then it's got its official launch on June 4th