Despite raising a record-breaking $8.5 million on Kickstarter three years ago and millions more in venture capital, Ouya has failed to gain ground against Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo in the competitive gaming console space.
The Los Angeles-based company, which had the aggressive mission of building a completely open gaming console for TV using using Google’s Android operating system, has been sold to Razer, a San Diego, Calif.-based gaming company better known for making gaming accessories, like controllers, headphones and keyboards.
TechCrunch reports today that Razer is paying an undisclosed sum for the company’s software and developer relations team to help it build out its Forge TV console and Cortex gaming platform. But it is not acquiring Ouya’s hardware business, including its $99 console and controller that it is famous for building.
Prior to the sale, Ouya had received a ton of attention from fans and the gaming industry for its prospects of disrupting a very closed ecosystem. It raised $33.6 million with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Jay Adelson, Mayfield Fund, Nvidia, Occam Capital and Shasta Ventures.
Meanwhile, Razer, which recently raised money at a $1 billion, and has the backing of Intel and others, seems to have the financial means to enter the space in a considerable way. Potentially, together the two companies will have a better shot of signing up both developers and customers to the alternative gaming platform.
Razer says its software platform has more than 2 million daily active gamers, and Ouya claims to have 1,137 games and 200,000 users. Those games and users will be moved over to Razer’s platform. Razer pledges to support the Ouya hardware for a year or more, but essentially this marks the end for the Kickstarter phenom as a standalone business.
