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Ouya confirms launch delay

by on10 May 2013

At least three more weeks

Ouya has confirmed that the commercial official launch of the console will be delayed about three weeks. This has moved the retail launch from June 4th to June 25th. The change does not affect the shipment of units to Kickstarter backers. (In fact, we received word that our unit shipped today!) Ouya claims that all Kickstarter backers should have their units shipped before the end of May.

The bigger news is that Ouya has been able to secure $15 million in additional funding from private investors. As part of the deal, investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, an original investor in Electronic Arts, will see Bing Gordon (a 26-year veteran of EA) join the board at Ouya. Gordon is one of the partners at KPCB.

The $15 million in additional capital will help Ouya to make the OUYA everything it can be, according to CEO Julie Uhrman. The funding will be used to increase production to meet the demand that the company is seeing for the Ouya from just about everywhere. The company says that backer units were or are being sent to 110 different countries. While Ouya has retail deals in the US, Canada, and the UK, the company has had interest from many other places around the globe as well. The company is working on deals in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Latin America.

Since initial release, Ouya has released a number of updates to both the software as well as the hardware. The company is already talking about being able to take advantage of falling prices to deliver an Ouya that is better and more advanced than the current one as part of the company’s strategy to deliver an updated console every year. The games, of course, will be backward compatible across the different Ouya models.

The success of Ouya is still unknown, as it is too early to tell how well it will do over the long haul. What we do know is that so far this is the best of the Android consoles and they do seem to be in the best position right now to succeed.

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