Ouya’s New Free The Games Fund Rules

zacharySep 25, 2013

Not long after posting my article on selling an Ouya exclusive Kickstarter, Ouya changed all the rules on me. It was a very good thing too. Now, pretty much all the thought and planning that went into pulling off a successful $50k Kickstarter has been rendered useless, for the better.

The big changes are to the minimum funds needed to be raised and the exclusivity of the game. No longer will I need to try to raise $50k to get matching funds; I can now raise anything over $10k. This is a great thing as it will allow me the comfort of focusing on a smaller game project. Something I think can be more doable than a full $50k project.

With the change in exclusivity, I no longer need to worry about convincing PC backers to wait an extra 6 months. They can get the game right alongside the Ouya backers. The only people who need to wait are other microconsoles and mobile users. Not really a big deal there. Even then, they only need to wait 1 month times the number of $10k chunks that Ouya backs up to 6 months.

So what does this mean for Divine Knight Gaming? Well, it means two things.

The first is that it means that we have a far better chance of getting matching funds for any project we might do. The lower barrier will help us put together a project we feel good about and feel would be able to reach at least $10k.

The second is that we will have a lot more competition. With that lower barrier, a lot more game projects will be vying for a chunk of the pie. So by the time we are ready to introduce our Kickstarter, we may be gunning for a much smaller chunk of the pie than we initially expected. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Frankly, I am more excited about the Free the Games Fund now than I was two weeks ago. It feels more doable and open to me now. I am still not sure how I want to approach it just yet, but I certainly want to try hard at getting a game prototype or two out there to see what feels right. We will just have to wait and see.