14 
Score one for the consumer. Ouya‘s come out and said that all games that are compatible with the system will be forced to have free-to-play periods, which are basically demos, so you can try before you buy. No more coughing up good money only to find you’ve just bought absolute rubbish.
Julie Uhrman, Ouya’s CEO, said to GameIndustry International:
“It removes the confusion between a paid app store and a free app store. We also think it cuts down on the copycat games, where you have games that look like each other and one is paid but the other is free and you don’t know what to do.”
Apparently Ouya’s going to police its app store a little too, monitoring for copycat games, malware, and pornography, but everything else is go. This is a serious win for the consumer, and hopefully it’ll get rid of the damn ‘freemium’ trend we’re seeing at the moment, where to play the game properly you have to keep shelling out dosh on crappy in-app purchases. Just let me buy the thing outright for goodness sake. [GII via CVG]
Ouya Games-in-Progress List Currently Stands at a Whopping 481
Ouya, the Android Gaming Console, Gets a Massive Kick In the Pants From OnLive
Co-Creator of Portal Working on Exclusive Ouya Game Soul Fjord
The issue will be how it’s implemented.
I don’t see it as much of a problem.
All WinPhone apps allow you to trial them initially.
Never even seen a WinPhone so did not know that.
Yeah it’s the one thing I believe they do better than Android.
On Droid there is sometimes a free app or lite version.
But every WinPhone app has the option to try it. So there there will only ever be 1 version of the app in store.
Those rubbish freemium games should really have a big banner on them to alert you. Nothing worse than seeing a bunch of screenshots that look good and then realising it’s a money pit. I’d rather pay good money for a good game.
Agreed, it’s infuriating.
Yeah.
Free to play isn’t a bad idea. It’s just shitty developers taking the idea and making it pay to play that is shit
Yes indeed.
Free to play works best when purchases don’t have anything more than a purely cosmetic effect e.g. Valve’s F2P model for Dota and TF
Whilst this seems promising, there is nothing to imply that this would do away from IAP/Freemium based software model, which will probably still exist, although its a step in the right direction. Anyone know if free games will still be allowed in the store?
Great news. My favourite thing the Xbox has over the PS3