Ah Razer and OUYA, two companies I once liked and respected who have both done something to draw my ire. For Razer it was their shameless price gouging tactics for Australian citizens, something which they continue to this day. OUYA simply smoldered its way through all the goodwill I had towards them, ultimately delivering an unfinished product late that has since lumbered along in a kind of zombie state. There had been rumours that OUYA had been courting Razer for a while now, hoping to find a buyer, but like all acquisition talks both sides were rather mum on the details. Today Razer has announced that they will acquire OUYA and use them to bolster their own efforts in this space.
The deal has said to be an “all cash” acquisition meaning that Razer has used its own cash reserves to pay off all of OUYA’s investors. This pegs the asking price at somewhere around the $33 million mark which sounds like a lot however Razer was just valued somewhere in the order of $1 billion meaning an acquisition of this size won’t put much of a strain on their purse strings. Still I and many others really didn’t see how OUYA could fit into Razer’s business model which, for the most part, is centered around gaming peripherals more than platforms. As it turns out Razer may be looking to OUYA to fix it’s Forge platform which, funnily enough, is encountering many of the same issues that OUYA struggled with.
As part of the acquisition deal Razer will take on the software branch of OUYA but will drop the hardware business. This makes sense since Razer is, in essence, already selling a competing platform but also because the OUYA in its current state is heavily outdated and unlikely to provide much value as another product line. The OUYA store will be integrated in Razer’s Cortex platform, along with the 200,000 user accounts and all the games currently published on the platform. The OUYA brand name will remain but will transition to focus more on becoming a publisher for the Cortex platform more than anything else. Overall it seems like a great outcome for OUYA but I’m not convinced that it’ll do much for Razer.
The Razer Forge’s launch was, to be blunt, a complete disaster as the console proved to be buggy and largely unusable on launch day. Sure the base functionality seemed to work fine however that’s not something that’s unique to the Razer Forge and indeed other products will provide that at a much more reasonable price. Things get worse when you compare it to, admittedly slightly more expensive options, like the NVIDIA shield which received universal praise for the quality of all aspects of the product. Whilst the OUYA team might be able to help fix these problems I feel like they’re already several steps behind the competition and throwing more bodies at the problem isn’t going to solve it.
It may be my dislike for both these companies speaking through but in all honesty the only people that won out in this deal where the investors who were likely staring down the barrels of a soon to be bankrupt company. The Android micro-console market just doesn’t have the legs that everyone hoped it would and the market is already saturated with dozens of other devices that do a multitude of other things than just play games. I will be very surprised if Razer manages to make their Forge TV anything more than it currently is, even with the supposed expertise of the OUYA team behind them.
