Ouya launch delayed to June 25; company raises another $15 million in funding

The $99 Android console Ouya will not hit store shelves on its planned June 4 launch date. Instead, the console will be made available at retailers in the US, UK and Canada on June 25. Julie Uhrman, CEO, Ouya, stated on the Ouya blog that the launch was delayed as the company had to meet the high demand for the console by retail stores and gamers.

“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 25,” she wrote.

However, the launch delay will not affect shipments of the console to Kickstarter backers. Uhrman noted that the company was on track when it came to shipping units for early backers before the end of this month. Ouya had started shipping its consoles to backers who donated $95 or above on March 28.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Ouya won’t be available till June 25, but the company sure has a lot of money now

But there’s also good news for Ouya fans. The company has managed to raise $15 million in funding from a bunch of new investors. The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from Nvidia, Mayfield Fund, Shasta Ventures and Occam Partners. Combined with the $8.5 million it raised on Kickstarter, this brings Ouya’s total funding amount to more than $23 million.

In addition, Kliener Perkins’ General Partner Bing Gordon has been added to Ouya’s board of directors. Gordon has worked with Electronic Arts and is also present on the board of directors of Amazon, Klout, Lockerz, MEVIO, Zazzle and Zynga.

As if this weren’t enough, Uhrman also revealed that the company has signed more than 12,000 developers for developing games. This number has grown by  more than 2,000 since April 20, when Ouya said it had seen 10,000 developers sign up for the platform.

Ouya is also fixing an issue with its controller, where the buttons could get stuck when pressed. Joystiq cites Uhrman as saying that the problem has been fixed—they’ve added larger button holes—and is being implemented in production. “I don’t know what the exact millimeter is, but we’ve increased the size just a little bit, so now the buttons don’t stick under it. We made that change very early so all the units are being produced with those larger button holes,” Uhrman was quoted as saying.

The folks at Joystiq were also told that the new controllers are being shipped to Kickstarter backers as well. Ouya said it would work with people who have problems with their controllers through its customer service.