Razer Buys Ouya Gaming Software and Personnel, Discontinues Console

Gaming company Razer has acquired the software of the Android microconsole maker Ouya.

Ouya had tried to bring Android gaming to television. Now, Ouya’s accounts, controllers, games, as well as its technical and developer relations employees, will become part of Razer’s gaming system, Cortex TV. Razer has discontinued the Ouya hardware.

Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman will not be working with Razer but said, “Ouya was created with the goal to give developers more freedom. In doing this, we created the first open platform for television. And, with more than 1,000 games, we offered more content — and a broader variety — than any other platform. We are excited that Razer will expand our vision. While this was a hard trail to blaze, we proved that we could bring new thinking to how the games industry operates and we hope we have paved the way for others, allowing all game developers to bring his or her game to the big screen.”

Concerning the acquisition, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said, “There are about 200,000 users on the OUYA platform and for the hardware users, we intend to, out of goodwill (as we didn’t acquire the hardware assets), keep the lights on for their gaming service for at least 12 months as we encourage them to migrate to the Razer service which will have a lot more features, new content and new games. We will have more follow up [sic] announcements soon on the transition to the new service.” Customers will receive “freebies, giveaways and promotions.”

Razer will be paying Ouya’s debts to developers, which amount to nearly $620,000. Razer will also allow developers to put their games on other platforms in a Free the Games initiative; however, these developers must repay Razer publishing expenses by selling however many dollars worth of video games that they were provided by Razer.

Ouya had garnered more than $8.5 million on Kickstarter to develop their mobile-to-TV console, earning more money in one day than any other Kickstarter project at the time. However, the company nearly stopped producing their hardware in March 2014 due to little developer or gamer interest.

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