Raising $1 million on Kickstarter is an impressive feat, but doing so in eight hours and 22 minutes is unprecedented.
That's the time it took Ouya -- an Android-based video game console -- to become the fastest crowd-sourcing campaign to reach the $1 million mark in the site's history, according to Kickstarter's blog.
It took the 2nd fastest project -- a point and click disc-based video game called Double Fine Adventure -- twice as long to raise $1 million, at 17 hours and 30 minutes. Third place in terms of speediness was 27 hours for the much talked about Pebble watch, which uses Bluetooth to synch with iPhones and Androids. That project eventually closed out at well over $10 million.
The appeal of Ouya -- pronounced a lot like "booya" without the "b" -- may lie with its open-source technology, its low price tag of $99, and the fact that the console is aimed at returning gamers back to the days when video games were played on big screens, and not in the palm of their hands.
"There's a lot of focus today on the mobile and web platform," Ouya's founder, Julie Uhrman, says in the project's promotional video. "It's easier to develop games for those platforms than the television ... I've been trying to figure out how do we get them back to it?"
The Ouya campaign still has 28 days left to raise money and, according to The Next Web, its creators were surprised enough by their own success to effectively ask contributors for suggestions on just what to put all that money towards, should their streak continue.
"You shocked the world. And us!" the founders wrote in a thank you note to their backers. "The biggest thing for us right now: we are working on our stretch goals, what we can do if we raise more money. It might take us a few days to figure that out, and we want your help."
Ouya broke a second Kickstarter record by raising $2.5 million in its first 24 hours of launch and it joins a long list of video game campaigns that have proved wildly popular on the site. In fact, half of Kickstarter's top eight fastest-funded projects have related to video games. "Wasteland 2," the sequel to a 1988 video game is among them, having raised close to $3 million on the site and "Shadow Returns" is as well, having hit almost $2 million.
Ouya's founder made a point in the promotional video that the console has strong industry potential -- and not just to make money.
"This is a big undertaking and effectively we're trying to disrupt an established industry," Uhrman says. "It takes a lot of guts and courage. If I wasn't a female, I'd say big balls."