
John Romero Speculates On The Future of Ouya  - cooldeal
http://www.pcworld.com/article/259962/john_romero_speculates_on_the_future_of_ouya.html
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programminggeek
Ever since the Ouya was announced, it seemed to me like it is a project that
Gamestop will/should try to buy.

With digital marketplaces, Gamestop, Best Buy, Amazon, Wal-Mart and other more
traditional retail avenues run the risk of becoming irrelevant the same way
Tower Records and Blockbuster did.

Look at Steam on the PC, why on earth would you buy from Gamestop? Oh wait,
Gamestop doesn't sell PC games anymore really. Wal-Mart and Best Buy sell a
few. Gamestop needs to do something to put themselves in a position to be
relevant in 5-10 years or the Xbox 3 and Playstation 4 at some point in their
lifecycle will likely be close enough to digital only that you'll have 80% of
sales be digital instead of 10-20%. That will kill Gamestop and will put a
hurt on Wal-Mart and Best Buy as well.

Gamestop has started trading in and selling tablets, but they don't get any of
the software revenue and there's no such thing as "used apps", so unless they
get their own platform or marketplace to make a cut of sales on, I think
they're done in the long term.

Buying or building something like Ouya is probably Gamestop's best hope of not
dying in 5-10 years.

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lawtguy
I think Gamestop realizes that selling physical media is dying: they bought
Impulse, a PC game distribution site, from Stardock a few years ago in order
to have a digital distribution presence. I'm sure they're looking for more
ways to extend their business past physical media.

However, it's not clear to me that Ouya is interesting to Gamestop yet. They
aren't a publisher or a developer, so they can't make games appear on it. If
the games show up, and people pay for them, they'll probably be interested in
extended their digital distribution platform to Ouya.

