That might (or might not) be true, but it should have some bearing (as it did for me) on whether people who expect hackability should buy one, even at a clearance price.

I suspect the promise of such on their kickstarter page (positively) influenced their backers' donations, just like Ouya knew it would. Why promise it, unless they know it's something people want?

And you shouldn't even buy one hoping to hack it either.

Here's what the Kickstarter page said about openness and hackability:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

Hackers welcome. Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!

But close to release, I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.

His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.

From a long-dead ouyaforum.com thread:

I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.

After people began calling Al Sutton out over this and citing the Kickstarter page to him, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and that Ouya was doing modders a special favor by having it, and that Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).

As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.

It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability.

Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. And a functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.

Even worse was the principle of the thing, and the evil behaviour of promising a feature from the beginning, then trying to handwave it away at crunchtime and citing a vague low demand (which wouldn't matter even if true). It reeks of Elite:Dangerous, which announced that they disabled the offline mode right before release.

While this feels a bit like a slashvertisement, I'll let it slide for a game this good.

Customer revolts are wonderful things.

Yep, if you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.

Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if I know. IMO, it was intentional double speak so they could claim "it's not actually a real name policy" whenever convenient.

Add to that at least one false start of rescinding the policy (is this one for real? Who knows?), and it's no wonder most of the internet judged them no more trustworthy (and of course potentially far more dangerous) than Facebook.

Lockheed's fusion reactor was reported the same way:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

Is there something about energy tech that makes people afraid to mention a third dimension (other than time, of course)?

I think we will find there is one rulebook for punishing people like Snowden, and another for VIPs like Petraeus. And yet another (very thin) one for super ultra-VIPs like Clinton.

Sorry this comes so late, but yes, there are reasons to care about Gamergate even if you don't care about video games. How about the censorship campaign that compromised vast swarths of the internet, including nearly the entire games press, Reddit and no less than 4chan itself for fuck's sake. The fact that there exists a faction willing and able to carry out such a campaign is IMO the most revealing (and shocking) part of efforts to stomp Gamergate out of existence. For anyone who witnessed it firsthand, “Nobody is going to take your games away” makes for a rather trite and feeble reassurance.

Hopefully you can also be persuaded to care about journalists giving positive coverage to their friends without disclosing those relationships. And to care about journalists printing misinformation to push an agenda, instead of simply reporting the news. Read up on Rolling Stone's fake UVA rape story if you haven't already. The parallels to the Gamergate scandal are uncanny, and neither can be explained away by a mere lack of understanding on the journalists' part. And take notice of how many articles, even after the story was known to be horseshit, still try to push forward a ""silver lining" narrative that RS's reporting "raised awareness" about the "important issue" of "rape culture" on campus.

And it's not just games they want to dictate the content of. This has happened in comics, sci-fi, atheism, music . . . pretty much any subculture they think they can get away with co-opting and controlling. If that still doesn't hit close enough to home, remember that Slashdot ownership/editors have proven to be on the pro-corruption and pro-censorship side of the Gamergate controversy (in a total 180 from /.'s anti-Jack-Thompson days), and therefore you haven't been allowed to read a single article here describing anything in my GP post (i.e. anything about the actual journalism scandal). And that kind of censorship probably isn't limited to game content either.

Hope that helps.

It causes you physical pain that few here buy into the "mysogyny and harrassment" narrative, doesn't it?

The cover-up didn't work.
The week-long gaming press news blackout and ongoing user comment/forum censorship (in former free-speech strongholds such as 4chan and Reddit, no less) didn't work.
The coordinated, ongoing smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Over" articles hasn't worked.
The endless train of embarrassingly desperate counter-hashtags hasn't worked.
The Wikipedia and Nightline hit pieces only damage those outlets' credibility for short-term effect.
The SVU episode . . . hahaahhahaha WOW, where do I even begin . . . it is progapanda that couldn't be more precisely crafted to the corrupt press's specifications (i.e. "narrative"), and broadcast to a national non-gamer audience, much of which likely accepted it as reality. It was a wake-up call to quite a few previously unaware or neutral parties, especially game devs*.

Eurogamer is the latest games journalism site to update its ethics policy in the wake of Gamergate, joining PC Gamer, IGN, the Escapist, and of course Kotaku/Gawker (though in Gawker's case, they put up more of a fight and the Gamergate pressure to be ethical had to be routed through the FTC).

Gamergate also got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him:
https://twitter.com/iamDavidWi...
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
http://www.zenofdesign.com/in-...

Ask yourself how much of this you've seen reported in the corrupt media (which at this point, sadly, clearly includes Slashdot). Of course none of it ever had a chance of appearing in the Wikipedia article. Nothing enrages anti-Gamergaters more than someone covering both sides of the story, and that should tell you something.

Their side thrives only in an environment of propaganda and censorship, and evaporates when faced with integrity and transparency. They prove the need for Gamergate every time they write an article based on the assumption that terrorism and child porn^W^W^W^W misogyny and harassment have become the root passwords to the Constitution^W^W journalistic ethics.


* like Mark Kern and Ken Levine, who had nothing to do with Gamergate, but were so disgusted by the SVU episode that they publically called on the gaming press to stop slandering gamers. Both were instantly swarmed by anti-GG on twitter, and VG24/7 ran a hit piece on Kern without even getting his side of the story, and refused even after he specifically asked them. I think Eurogamer saw exactly what happened to Kern, and it's no accident that that their policy explicitly includes a "right of reply" (perhaps a subtle message that they won't similarly treat game devs like shit).

P.S. Note that the media's excuse for not addressing Gamergate's ethics complaints has been that they're busy slandering them as terrorists and harassers. But when Kern independently called them out . . . the corrupt press attacked him just the same, and claimed his complaints weren't worth addressing. It's clear what they're really afraid of: being held accountable (i.e. ethics).

It is unacceptable to pretend that only one side of a controversy is receiving those threats, and blaming the other side for them without evidence. Doubly unacceptable, if you're a supposed journalist doing that.

No, SJW has gone mainstream with its core meaning intact: someone makes a show of standing up against oppression, but through their actions proves to be little more than a self-serving narcissist, seeking out offense even where there is none and making a mountain out of petty bullshit.

It's a play on "keyboard warrior" but the phrase itself is mostly irrelevant. I didn't always know why "mouthbreather" was considered an insult until I had a couple of them as coworkers for a while. No doubt for a lot of people, Gamergate has been similarly enlightening with regard to the term "Social Justice Warrior."

If you're looking for a word that has lost a lot of meaning through misuse while gaining popularity, see "troll."

How fortunate that, as a browser maker (along with Microsoft and Apple), they've coincidentally pushed for DRM to become part of web standards.

And that they obtained considerable financial influence over the browser maker thought most likely to resist (Mozilla).

And that Mozilla gave in.

FTFY. Seriously, I would praise any company that ruthlessly did what you describe (as long as it didn't benefit the Onlive scamsters, as the typical buyout would).

This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with it:

Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.

All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to be behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.

Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with Onlive, etc. it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.

Then there are the bandwidth requirements.

Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).

Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that Onlive would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).

Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.

P.S. If Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins were DOA, how the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?

An interesting note is that we do have cockpit video of the SpaceShipTwo disaster because no such union was involved, and it did seem to result in useful information. Still not sure which side of the issue I land on. I know I wouldn't want to be videotaped 24/7 at work.

Note that even after we knew the UVA frat rape accusation was horseshit, MSM news articles about it still pushed the talking point that it "raised awareness" and "started a conversation" about "rape culture" and the "epidemic of sexual assault" on campuses. "Win or lose" (i.e. facts be damned) the narrative matters above all else.