Report: Ouya Looking To Sell Quickly To Pay Off Mounting Debt

Admin Posts : 910 Join date : 2012-05-09

Quote :: According to an email allegedly sent by Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman this month, the company responsible for the eponymous microconsole needs to find a buyer quickly. Ouya originally raised $8.6 million via Kickstarter within July and August 2012.

Today’s news comes via a report from Fortune, which says it has obtained a copy of a confidential email sent to investors.

The company later received funding from a variety of venture capital sources and, most recently, received $10 million from Chinese set-top box provider Alibaba. Even after a move into a service architecture called Ouya Everywhere that brought the company’s games to the Madcatz Mojo Android handheld, players didn’t warm up.

Just a month after that announcement, we learned that the best selling game on the platform had only moved 7,000 copies. This follows a report in mid-2013 that stated that users were only upgrading from trials to full, paid games at a rate of 8 percent.

Ouya also misstepped with a development incentive program that offered little monetary reward and demanded onerous exclusivity periods. The "Free the Games Fund" was also criticized for potentially incentivizing cheating of the Kickstarter system by offering a $100,000 bounty for the program that raised the most funding.