Razer has confirmed its acquisition of microconsole maker Ouya after a small slip-up from the investment bank Mesa Group in June. With this deal, Ouya has agreed to sell its software and app store to Razer and the company will then transition to its “more advanced” Forge TV. Razer will keep Ouya service alive for one more year, before closing it down. It will keep Ouya name as a separate publisher but will not keep the hardware business of Ouya alive, which will slowly wither and die.
It has also acqui-hired the company’s technical and developer relations teams to expand Razer’s Android TV gaming business, but Ouya’s CEO and co-founder Julie Uhrman will not go to Razer with her team as a part of the deal.
“Ouya’s work with game developers, both triple A and indies, went a long way in bringing Android games to the living room and Razer intends to further that work,” Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a statement. “This acquisition is envisaged to usher more developers and content to the Android TV platform.”
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Ouya was finding it difficult to keep up with the competition with the likes of Razer and other tech giants like Google and Apple and were in a lookout for a buyer since April. Tan told TechCrunch that the Ouya buyout was an all-cash deal but for how much was the console maker acquired has not been revealed.
Ouya has been closely working with companies like Xiaomi for is MiBox and Alibaba for its TMall box and this will continue under the new ownership but Razer will also be integrating Ouya’s games, controllers and accounts to its Cortex TV gaming platform, and will relaunch Ouya’s store as Cortex for Android TV. Alibaba in January this year had invested $10 million in Ouya.
Tan believes that Ouya’s publishing will still be an attractive option for small developers, helping them publish their games on the app stores, testing them, translating them to other languages and working with the app stores in different countries.