Ouya’s Kickstarter project closes at $8 million

It’s pretty safe to say that Ouya hit its Kickstarter target of $950,000.

In fact, it raised more than quintuple the amount of money that it was seeking, with the investment window closing early this morning.

The project actually managed to hit the ambitious ~$1 million target in less than 24 hours.

“People are ready for something new, and Ouya is that thing. We never expected to do this well and be this well-received. It’s just truly amazing that it’s resonated so well with gamers and developers,” said Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman.

Ouya boasts a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage.

Since making a small splash on online enthusiast sites, it has gained viral attention. Its addition to Kickstarter to earn development funds from people wanting to get in on the ground floor has been incredibly successful.

There are tens of thousands of investors in the Ouya project on Kickstarter.

Most investors have plunked down at least $99, at which point the company says it will provide a console and a controller.

Streaming video game devices appear to be the big thing these days. Onlive is as popular as ever, and is poised to get a large boost when it fully integrates with Google TV.

And Sony just acquired Gaikai, the other key player in the “Netflix for video games” market.

Of course, Android isn’t exactly the biggest name in the world of gaming, so this project is very interesting in many respects. We’ll see if it can pull of what it’s trying to achieve.