UPDATE: You can now read our complete Ouya review of the retail system to see if the wait was worth it.
Today a brand new gaming console was announced via Kickstarter called Ouya. Taking the world a bit by surprise, the $99 console has garnered large scale support and is now earning cash at the incredible clip of over $100,000 per hour.
Announced earlier today the console has big aims: to change the face of console game development. The three big console makers: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all enforce strict limits on what can be released on their platform. They have a say in what, when, and how much games can cost. Furthermore, even getting an audience with one of the big three can be time consuming, difficult, and expensive. Ouya wants to take that away, and allow independent developers to frolick freely.
Presumeably, their model will function somewhat similarly to the iPhone with only loose restrictions on what can be released based on a set of values (in the iPhone's case that basically means anything goes besides porn and copyright infringement.) The console will be based on the Android operating system, and as such they are already showing a number of games like Shadowgun which already run on that OS.
UPDATE: Ouya has stormed past their initial funding goals, and is continuing to gain funding at an incredible rate as news of this story and the Kickstarter reaches its tendrils further out into the internet.
Watch the Ouya videos from Kickstarter below:
