It was yesterday that Razer announced that they would be acquiring OUYA. However it seems that after the announcement was made, many indies expressed their frustration namely because it seemed to indicate that the funding that OUYA promised indie devs would no longer be paid out.For those unfamiliar, OUYA had previously promised $1 million in funding that would go out to indie devs to help them create games for the console, but the acquisition of OUYA by Razer effectively killed those deals, or at least that’s what it seemed. However it looks like Razer will be playing the good guy and has recently confirmed that they will be picking up the tab.
According to Razer’s CEO Min-Liang Tan who spoke to the folks at Polygon, he was quoted as saying, “What we want to do is make sure we support indie developers. Razer will be backing the new Ouya publishing arm. So we are going to try and make good on this fund and give these developers an option.”
In fact the new deal seems to put the devs at an advantage. For starters, games released under the fund will no longer be exclusive to the OUYA platform, and that the money used for the games then be used to give out free copies via Razer’s Cortex storefront, so if a dev was given $10,000 and sold their game at $10 a copy, they’d have to give out 1,000 copies to call it even, so to speak.
Tan adds that this isn’t something they’re legally obligated to do, but it’s something they want to do anyway. “For ourselves at Razer, we’ve always done stuff for our fans. This is purely being done out of goodwill. I think this is going to be great for the developers. I think they’re going to be able to get the games done and gamers will get access to games for free. Then those games will spread through word of mouth.”