Remember Ouya’s Free the Games Fund? You’d be forgiven for forgetting considering it was started almost two years ago. Essentially, Ouya created a $1 million dollar developer fund that would match 100 percent of total funds raised up to $250,000 from Kickstarter campaigns that concluded by August 10, 2014. After Razer acquired Ouya just the other day, however, it appeared as if developers’ contracts were not being honored in the acquisition.
Multiple unnamed developers told Vice and Kotaku that contracts for thousands of dollars were not being honored. After the peripheral company bought Ouya, the checks stopped coming in for the developers. Vice was told by a Razer spokesperson that the Free the Games Fund was not a part of the Ouya acquisition, making it seem as if some developers would never see the money owed to them.
Razer later came out, however, to dispel any doubts and announce that they would pay the debts owed to the developers via a program of their own. While the program is largely the same as the Free the Games Fund, Razer released the following statement outlining one notable exception:
Under the proposed new agreements, Razer and Ouya publishing will forgo exclusivity in favor of developers providing an equitable amount of their FtG-funded titles to gamers for free on the Cortex TV platform. For example, if $10,000 is funded toward a $1 game, then 10,000 games at $1 would be given away at no cost to gamers on Cortex TV. Ouya publishing will not limit developers in any instance to one or another platform, but will promote publishing to all Android platforms–Google Play, Cortex TV, XiaoMi, Alibaba, and the likes.
Whether this is a company looking to honor what is arguably their responsibility to these developers or a careful plan to reel in more teams to develop for their platforms, this move is undeniably beneficial for all parties involved.
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