73% of Ouya owners have not bought a game

Woeya: Ouya CEO calls games sales ‘better than we expected’

Ou-no. Looks like nobody is punching their ticket to Richville making Ouya games. At least not yet. According to The Verge, Ouya titles aren’t making bank, as console owners seem to be sticking with free fare rather than purchasing games.

TowerFall, developed by Matt Thorson, is currently the Ouya’s best-selling title. The $14.99 game, which several friends have told me alone almost validates owning an Ouya, has been downloaded about 2,000 times, making Thorson about $21,000. The second “success” story Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman points to is Hidden in Plain Sight, for which the developer has earned $4,381. Meanwhile, some developers have made only a few hundred dollars and an enhanced version of TowerFall is coming to PC this year.

Still, Uhrman told The Verge that, “Monetization on Ouya is so far better than we expected,” which raises the question, ‘how bad were they expecting?’ Uhrman cited 23% of Ouya owners having bought a paid title as a positive statistic for the free to play platform. Similarly, Uhrman was satisfied with 13 out of 20 top grossing games having an average of 8 percent of users upgrading from the free to paid versions. 

“These numbers will grow as more gamers pick up consoles, and as we attract more developers, and I believe that by the end of the year, we’ll see a few developers telling us they’ve made more than a million dollars on Ouya,” Uhrman said. Maybe. But it’s hard to ignore the oddly positive pre-launch Ouya buzz and subsequent inability to capitalize on it. The console isn’t dead in the water, but that water has been chummed and Amazing Frog can’t swim fast enough to propel the system towards success.

Ouya CEO defends game sales as ‘better than we expected’ [The Verge]