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Big news! I am thrilled to share that OUYA has raised $15 million in funding from new investors. This is a really important step towards being around for the long haul. Our round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the same firm that originally backed Electronic Arts, and includes other great investors such as Mayfield Fund, NVIDIA (who also makes the chips inside of OUYA), Shasta Ventures (who backed great hardware companies like Nest), and Occam Partners.

So, what does this mean for you?

It means we've got additional resources to to make OUYA everything it can be. It means that we can increase production to meet our demand and continue to support game developers who are building innovative and exclusive games for OUYA.

Also, as you know, we've been shipping our early backers their units, gearing up for our official launch in June. The demand we're seeing from gamers and our retailers is beyond our expectations, so, to meet all this demand, we are shifting our launch date by three weeks to give us time to make more OUYAs. Our official launch date will be June 25th. This change in ship date does not affect backer shipments. We're still on track to have units shipped to our early backers - from both Kickstarter and OUYA.tv preorders before the end of May.

It keeps getting better!

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The noteworthy thing here isn't necessarily that emulation is coming to the platform, but rather that the emulators themselves appear to have been officially blessed by Ouya and can be installed directly, without side-loading.

Emulation software itself is useless without some actual games to play, and therein lies the rub: getting the contents of NES/SNES/N64 ROM cartridges off of the cartridges and onto a computer requires some specialized equipment that most folks don't have. So, just about everyone playing emulated cartridge games does so with ROM images downloaded from various places around the web. The legality of downloading ROM images even of games one actually owns is shady at best, and so touting the OUYA as an emulation machine means potentially tempting customers into engaging in copyright infringement in order to build up a library of ROMs—assuming they don't have such a library already.

Ouya's open nature means that emulators will absolutely be available one way or another—users not being bound to big developers and their rules is one of the attractions of the system, and officially recognizing that no small number of users will want to use the system as a retro-gaming "uberconsole" is simply acknowledging the giant elephant sitting in the corner. The type of user most attracted to the Ouya is also the type most able to install an emulator and locate vintage ROMs to play, and so making emulators available for the system at launch merely lowers an already very low barrier.

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When I reached out to an Ouya representative to figure out exactly what the boundaries and legality of these emulators are, they had this to say:

"OUYA will accept emulators as long as they adhere to our content guidelines and are not submitted with any games. Meaning, if they have games they would be breaking our IP infringement guidelines."

Here are those guidelines. But what happens when people start submitting games for those emulators? The response:

"They would have to have a legitimate license to the IP to submit content. Also the content would have to come in an .apk."

When asked to elaborate, I was told:

"We only accept .apks - ROM's won't be available / accepted in the OUYA store."

It's not clear if that .apk format requirement will effectively block users from figuring out a way to run pirated Nintendo games on the emulators. Especially when we've already seen the Ouya running an emulated game, likely not exactly legally.

In terms of Nintendo actually selling their games on the Ouya? Also not likely. I imagine Nintendo wouldn't easily give up access to their games, especially when their own console is capable of running their classics. Of course, there are ways to use an emulator legally. Like submitting content through the proper checkpoints.

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