Ouya Surprised By Reactions to Free the Games Fund

[AzrealMaximillion]

Wow, there are Ouya fanboys defending the console's clearly exploitable funding system. I never took the Ouya seriously due to its lackluster PR and underwhelming product architecture. Now its going to be even harder to take the damn thing seriously if people are literally going to defend the Ouya staff for not investigating fraudulent funding.

No. The Ouya isn't exploiting anything.
It is the devs involved in Ouya's campaign that is ruining it for everybody else. It isn't Ouya's job to make sure Kickstarter properly identifies which dev donations are legit, and which are frauds. That job belongs to Kickstarter and Kickstarter alone.
The fact that people are putting all the blame of Kickstarter's loop holes on a console that can't control any of that is petty and childish.

I never said the Ouya was exploiting anything. I was pointing out that there is clearly fraud going on the the Ouya staff are flat out refusing to do anything about it.

Also you must not have read how this fundraising program in question works. The Ouya staff said they'd match whatever donations are put into the Kickstarter of an Ouya game in return for Ouya exclusivity. So now that they know that fraudulent donations are being made, the Ouya staff instead of investigating would just go ahead and match the donation anyways.

Another point, how can you say that its the devs ruining this program for everyone when the devs mentioned in the OP removed their games from Kickstarter and the Ouya due to the Ouya staff's lack of caring about the situation? Either other devs are making large donations for their games to get the Ouya's funding or the Ouya staff is making large donations to the Kickstarters themselves to get some exclusive games for their fledgling console. The Free the Games Fund is open to exploit on both sides yet only the Ouya staff has come out and straight up said that they don't care as long as they get exclusive games.

That throws suspicion more on the Ouya staff than anyone at the moment. Not saying they are exploiting anything, but them not investigating the fraud is an issue that hurts their integrity.

 

[Dragonbums]

Wow, there are Ouya fanboys defending the console's clearly exploitable funding system. I never took the Ouya seriously due to its lackluster PR and underwhelming product architecture. Now its going to be even harder to take the damn thing seriously if people are literally going to defend the Ouya staff for not investigating fraudulent funding.

No. The Ouya isn't exploiting anything.
It is the devs involved in Ouya's campaign that is ruining it for everybody else. It isn't Ouya's job to make sure Kickstarter properly identifies which dev donations are legit, and which are frauds. That job belongs to Kickstarter and Kickstarter alone.
The fact that people are putting all the blame of Kickstarter's loop holes on a console that can't control any of that is petty and childish.

I never said the Ouya was exploiting anything. I was pointing out that there is clearly fraud going on the the Ouya staff are flat out refusing to do anything about it.

Also you must not have read how this fundraising program in question works. The Ouya staff said they'd match whatever donations are put into the Kickstarter of an Ouya game in return for Ouya exclusivity. So now that they know that fraudulent donations are being made, the Ouya staff instead of investigating would just go ahead and match the donation anyways.

Another point, how can you say that its the devs ruining this program for everyone when the devs mentioned in the OP removed their games from Kickstarter and the Ouya due to the Ouya staff's lack of caring about the situation? Either other devs are making large donations for their games to get the Ouya's funding or the Ouya staff is making large donations to the Kickstarters themselves to get some exclusive games for their fledgling console. The Free the Games Fund is open to exploit on both sides yet only the Ouya staff has come out and straight up said that they don't care as long as they get exclusive games.

That throws suspicion more on the Ouya staff than anyone at the moment. Not saying they are exploiting anything, but them not investigating the fraud is an issue that hurts their integrity.

The Ouya staff have no control, nor can they do anything about this anyway.
This is something Kickstarter has to fix themselves.
Ouya cannot ask for any information regarding their backers. Only Kickstarter has the ability to do that.
Therefore pointing fingers at the console team and accusing them of doing "nothing" is misplaced, because there is literally nothing they can do to either find out about who's fake and who's not, nor do anything about it.

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

The Ouya staff have no control, nor can they do anything about this anyway.
This is something Kickstarter has to fix themselves.
Ouya cannot ask for any information regarding their backers. Only Kickstarter has the ability to do that.
Therefore pointing fingers at the console team and accusing them of doing "nothing" is misplaced, because there is literally nothing they can do to either find out about who's fake and who's not, nor do anything about it.

I disagree.

There's actually not much Kickstarter can do, and has no incentive to. They've done their part by suspending the account of one of the games mentioned, and frankly that's the most they can do. Kickstarter also has no incentive to investigate the abnormal donations because its not a Kickstarter fundraiser. To them, its just a Kickstarter account getting money. The problem lies with the fact that the Ouya fundraiser can be gamed. Why would Kickstarter investigate donations that cheat a third party fundraiser? The incentive to fraudulently donate to a Kickstarter only exists because of the Ouya fundraiser's rules.

On the flipside there's plenty the Ouya could do. They could suspend the fundraiser until they fix the loopholes in their fundraiser's rules. They could choose not to match the donations of games like Gridiron Thunder with suspicious patterns in the backing. When a game gets funded with over $100,000 (the average donation working out to be $934 per person) and only 183 backers. And the info of a game getting abnormal donations like, oh I dunno, $10,000 from a single backer almost every 4 days should be cause for alarm as well.

The Ouya staff could choose not to match the donations for that game or any game due to suspicious behaviour and it would be up to the developers to prove that their donations are clean.

Instead of them retaining the integrity of their fundraiser, they're effectively saying, "meh, we can't prove it so we'll fund the game even though there is suspicious behaviour behind how they got funded."

There are options for the Ouya staff to use on the table, but instead developers who aren't willing to cheat are just taking down their games from the Ouya.

 

[Dragonbums]

The Ouya staff have no control, nor can they do anything about this anyway.
This is something Kickstarter has to fix themselves.
Ouya cannot ask for any information regarding their backers. Only Kickstarter has the ability to do that.
Therefore pointing fingers at the console team and accusing them of doing "nothing" is misplaced, because there is literally nothing they can do to either find out about who's fake and who's not, nor do anything about it.

I disagree.

There's actually not much Kickstarter can do, and has no incentive to. They've done their part by suspending the account of one of the games mentioned, and frankly that's the most they can do. Kickstarter also has no incentive to investigate the abnormal donations because its not a Kickstarter fundraiser. To them, its just a Kickstarter account getting money. The problem lies with the fact that the Ouya fundraiser can be gamed. Why would Kickstarter investigate donations that cheat a third party fundraiser? The incentive to fraudulently donate to a Kickstarter only exists because of the Ouya fundraiser's rules.

On the flipside there's plenty the Ouya could do. They could suspend the fundraiser until they fix the loopholes in their fundraiser's rules. They could choose not to match the donations of games like Gridiron Thunder with suspicious patterns in the backing. When a game gets funded with over $100,000 (the average donation working out to be $934 per person) and only 183 backers. And the info of a game getting abnormal donations like, oh I dunno, $10,000 from a single backer almost every 4 days should be cause for alarm as well.

The Ouya staff could choose not to match the donations for that game or any game due to suspicious behaviour and it would be up to the developers to prove that their donations are clean.

Instead of them retaining the integrity of their fundraiser, they're effectively saying, "meh, we can't prove it so we'll fund the game even though there is suspicious behaviour behind how they got funded."

There are options for the Ouya staff to use on the table, but instead developers who aren't willing to cheat are just taking down their games from the Ouya.

Those loopholes were the result of Kickstarter. Ouya freezing the fundraising can have a negative impact on the legitimate devs who were raising honest money, and are depending on this fundraiser to complete their games, and then people will claim that the can't even do a fundraiser right. So it's a lose lose situation anyway.
Also, how do you expect Ouya to keep track of what could possibly be hundreds of games?
Why should they have to do what is arguably Kickstarter's job?
At the end of the day, this isn't a competition. If you make 50K within the time frame Ouya funds you. Them not checking who's legitimate or not (which is still KS job.) will only detract from them overall.