Two Weeks of Gridlock

As promised, here are the results from the first two weeks of Gridlock on OUYA. Others have written about the problems with the store front, so I won't repeat those issues here.

As you can see, that barely keeps us in coffee for a day. In fact, as things stand, we'll never see a cent because we'll never reach the threshold for being paid. As I wrote previously, the project was primarily about learning Unity but Gridlock is also a game I wanted to play, and I still do pick up a controller and play.

That conversion rate isn't too terrible - it's a lot lower than some others I've seen on the platform (see Radian Games, for example) - but it holds up against what I've seen elsewhere. But clearly we just aren't getting the download number high enough (the perennial problem, of course).

That all said, I'm happy that a few people seem to really love the game! It's definitely not to everyone's taste, though. One thing I'm particularly annoyed about is that we haven't been able to include a leaderboard, because OUYA have yet to add the ability to grab the player's account display name to their Unity SDK. We have the code all up and running on the server, but we don't particularly want to be displaying hexadecimal UUIDs on the leaderboard, nor do we want people to have to type in a name. As much as OUYA are misjudging the big stuff, they're also missing out all the little details that are needed to make sure creators can do what they need and want to do.

As things stand though, clearly OUYA doesn't give us a hope in hell of being able to make the next game. That doesn't really surprise me, but it does make me a little sad.

Onwards and upwards, though. We'll be bringing Gridlock to other platforms in the near future. Will we bring anything else to OUYA in the future? If you'd asked me two weeks ago, I'd have said yes, because I still think it's a good platform to experiment on and perhaps we could have built up an audience and fanbase there. Based on what we've seen in the last few days though, I'm not inclined to bring any projects in the future to the platform.