So the OUYA. There is still a community hungry for games. And I don't think, that the OUYA was a failure.
Why?
In 2012 was the Kickstarter. In this year it was very hard also for bigger companies to publish on consoles or on Steam.
In sommer of 2012 Steam decided to start Greenlight.
Yes, the Tegra 3 was not the fastest, but at this time, the most successful console was the Wii and the Wii had was from 2006 and was more in the range of a PS2 or XBox Classic.
The Tegra 3 supports Direct X 9c in a kind. So the hardware was not the problem itself.
What about games? So Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo had there mascots. E.g. Kratos, Master Chief and Super Mario.
Third Party support? Square Enix and Sega supported the OUYA. But first party? Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony all do games itself.
The next problem is the "time". e.g. God of War III is from 2010 and God of War 4 is from 2018. The PS4 was out in (end of) 2013.
So 5 years after the PS4 was lauchned and 8 years after the last version of the IP.
The OUYA was out in 2013 also, had not enough games, because nobody had time, to make them. Last year came some out, but it was to late.
A Rite from the Stars: A mystical Graphic Adventure e.g. Kickstarter from 2014, no in 2018 on Steam. (made with Unity, I guess)
TowerFall was made with Game Maker Studio and was a big success.
So what now? A lot of the Kickstarter OUYA projects are now on nVidia Shield / ShieldTV and also the Nintendo Switch.
The Tegra 3 is in some way the grandfather of the nVidia Shield TV. And the Nintendo Switch is a mobile version of the nVidia Shield.
OUYA: Tegra 3, 4+1 ARM Cortex A9 (ARM7 instructions), 1 GB RAM, and 8 GB + USB-Stick space, FullHD, H.264 video decoder, OpenGL ES 2.0, some DX9c with DXT-texture support
Switch: Tegra X1, 4+4 ARM Cortex A57/A53, all ARM7 compatible, 3 GB / 4 GB, 16 GB / 32 GB + SDCards, FullHD / 4K, H.265 video decoder, OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan, DX12
For 2D in most cases OpenGL ES 2.0 and FullHD is enough, also the RAM will do it.
The OUYA was a great idea, I think. Becaue developer hardware was expensive back in the day also and SDK software was about 2500,- to 10000,- alone.
And the OUYA SDK was free. Game Maker Studio 1.4 supports the OUYA export. For Game Maker Studio 2.x we would have to figure out some of the Android export settings, but it would still work.
So if your game would run on the OUYA, it would also run on the Switch.
I saw the OUYA for ~ 20,- bugs.
Why would it be good, to run the game on the OUYA? I guess, if it has about 20 to 30 FPS, it would be easy, to have stable 60 on the Switch or the nVidia Shield TV.
But if your game has about 30 on the Switch, you maybe don't know, if there could be some frame drops here and there.
The other thing are the loading times. To optimise the loading times on a weaker hardware could be good, to save also energy on the stronger mobile hardware. So the gamers could play your game longer with there batteries.
And maybe, you have only some levels or small levels yet and they run good, but also bigger levels could easily run on the Switch later.
Testing on a PC is sometimes not easy, if the PC is a monster in comparism to a mobile device.
Oh yeah. And maybe the OUYA was ahead of its time with "downloads" only. And the Nintendo Switch didn't made these mistakes. So we could all learn from that.