Ouya has officially been acquired by Razer

It was open source, it was cheap, and it crowdfunded to incredible success.

Original Story: Razer and Ouya are under scrutiny today after Vice’s Motherboard published an article claiming that Ouya is stiffing developers who participated in its “Free the Games” fund out of thousands of dollars.

Although it has been speculated since June that Razer might have bought Ouya, it took the company a month to officially acknowledge the acquisition.

In particular, Ouya is apparently not paying the debt owed to independent game developers as part of the company’s “Free the Games” fund, which promised to match contributions on games for Ouya that were successfully funded through Kickstarter.

Stay tuned, we’ll have more information on the Cortex for Android TV platform when it comes as well as the Razer Forge launch here in Australia as it happens. Under a new contract that will be offered to developers, they will receive the missing funding for their games much the same way as they were to under OUYA with two major exceptions. Ouya said it was given more than $10 million in funds past year. Ouya’s app store will be rebranded as “Cortex” and will service Razer’s Forge TV console, among other devices.

It’s been rumored and speculated for a while now, but it’s finally official- popular peripheral manufacturer Razer has purchased troubled Android based microconsole Ouya. However, Razer announced that it also options on phasing out the Ouya console, the hardware that manufactured Ouya renowned.

For the Ouya team, that means their jobs are safe as they will now be working for Razer’s software team.

Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan says the company is now trying to contact all of the affected developers, and encourages any developers with questions to email Razer. “I’m certain that he has clever ideas on how to make his many initiatives with Forge TV fit well with all the titles and hard work that OUYA put in”. He admits that despite the superb quality of their games, what they lack is a top-level hardware that can seamlessly integrate their games into the Android TV gaming world. Like the Ouya, the Forge sells for $99 on its own and $149 when bundled with a Razer controller.

“As far as the effect on development, the most important thing is that the Free The Games fund money covered the cost of OUYA development”.