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Yves Béhar discusses the Ouya as the console nears $3 million on Kickstarter

Yves Béhar discusses the Ouya as the console nears $3 million on Kickstarter

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The $99, Android-based Ouya game console Kickstarter project reached its goal in less than a day and just over 24 hours after it launched, it's closing in on three million in support. The designer behind the console, Yves Béhar, took the stage at the Mobile Beat conference today to talk about how it all came together

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Yves Behar Stock
Yves Behar Stock

The $99, Android-based Ouya game console Kickstarter project reached its goal in less than eight hours and as of this writing — just over day since it launched — it's closing in on three million dollars in support. The designer behind the console, Yves Béhar, took the stage at the Mobile Beat conference today to talk about how it all came together. The Ouya is up against the biggest players in the consumer electronics industry — Sony and Microsoft — but Béhar thinks that the gaming console business is ready for disruption from the bottom:

The gaming community [...] wants to be engaged, wants something new, wants it to be open. There’s lots of programmers, hackers, [and] game developers that don’t want to pay the huge fees that it takes to get a developer kit [for a major console].Earlier in the conference, another speaker called Android "Charmless," but Béhar doesn't believe that the platform needs to be so robotic forever. "There’s just not a lot of attention, of love and care and attention, on the platform. But that’s changing." Don't expect skeumorphism on the platform, though, Béhar calls it "bad design" that's "lazy."

We need to refine and detail things to be true to what their use and intention is, while building personality, while building brands. That’s the really exciting challenge when it comes to UI/UX for us.Ouya only came to Béhar’s Fuseproject three months ago, and in that short time the partners were able to come up with the design that has taken Kickstarter by storm.