Ouya ditching free demo requirement, offering up OS for other hardware

The Ouya team has announced a couple of initiatives that it hopes will bring relevance to the struggling console.

Eurogamer reports that head of developer relations Kellee Santiago told a GDC audience that Ouya is removing the need for devs to include a free-to-play demo of all titles uploaded to the Ouya store.

"The requests were coming from them that it was restrictive for certain kinds of content that they were interested in bringing to Ouya," she said. "Not every genre lends itself to having a demo or a tracked section or microtransactions."

Meanwhile, Digital Spy reports that the company intends to offer out the Ouya OS for users to install on their own hardware, SteamOS-style.

"Eventually the Ouya store will be available for download," lead engineer Zak Phelps told the site, also at GDC. [It] will be as simple as a store that you can install onto your [Android] device.

"That way if you want to install onto a tablet you can, under some very specific guidelines about here’s the types of things it’ll work with and won’t work with."

Apparently the company hopes to have this ready to go within six months.

The company recently announced the Ouya Everywhere initiative that will allow owners of alternative hardware, such as the Mad Catz Mojo, to run Ouya titles.