OUYA’s road to retail has been a rocky one. After a glorious Kickstarter campaign, delays and missteps have been abound. OUYA was hoping to put some of this behind them and spur some quality game development with their “Free The Games” campaign. They are matching the funding developers raise on Kickstarter up to $250k. The developer must hit a minimum of 50k in funding, and OUYA is offering 1 million in matching. This means that after they have matched a million, no other funding is available. All of this sounded great, but the first two GAMES to reach their goals have done so under a cloud of drama.

These two games are “Gridiron Thunder”, and “Elementary, My Dear Holmes”. Both games reached their funding goals very quickly, and neither seemed to show where all the money came from. Gridiron as of today has only 153 backers, but has brought in $98,883. This equals just over $645  per backer, which is a record breaking amount. However, adding up the visible backers equals no where near their current total of $98,883.  This does not seem to violate any Kickstarter rules, as backers don’t have to be public, but it has caused the Internets to cry fowl.

There has been speculation that the developers themselves put the money up, or even that OUYA has done some of the secretive funding. The developers and OUYA have both denied this. The developers both have stated that they have some enthusiastic donors who believe in their projects and have given large sums of money, but they have violated no Kickstarter or OUYA’s campaign terms. All of this has brought some more negative light to the OUYA console. Unless you believe in the old adage of “No press is bad press”.

By Chris Garica via Crowdfund Insider