People were told what it was, sure. But despite that, many of the backer's were expecting a console that could run games like Skyrim, Battlefield 3, and DayZ. They were frankly ignorant of technology in general, and the developer's didn't correct them and be honest even though they ran an official poll asking people what they wanted. That's why we're seeing a lot of those backers pissed off now, because they thought they were scammed. The Ouya devs partially acted shady, but I wouldn't say it was a scam. It was simply a bunch of people who knew nothing about consoles, getting themselves too invested into the project to realize their expectations were grossly out of touch with reality.
Yea the Devs and Kickstarter runners did not really bother at all to reign in the idea that this thing will be running modern/next gen console/pc games. Which, is kinda of shady.
But they really did hammer on, how this was going to to TEAR DOWN THE MAN, and stop EVIL PUBLISHERS and all the games would be FREE (except not) and yea, Emulators are awesome (until we stop saying that and stop officially supporting them), and its going to be your Console to do whatever!
And whats really stopping gaming is the barrier to entry, because everyone knows when you collapse the barrier to entry quality eventually goes up. Just look at the newgrounds portal for all the pending games. THey're all awesome. Promise.
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Also we've never designed any hardware really, so obviously this free us from the evil of industry design and to be truly free! The controller is gonna be the stradivarius of controllers (I shit you know, they said this.) But because this is /your/ console that /you/ believe in, you can use whatever controller you want. Its cool.
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And the only folks that seem to be excited by the Ouya are the folks that drank the Ouya kool aid. When folks started to get their Ouya, on /r/ouya and started to report problems. It was really strange, they assumed every thing else was wrong, before the ouya.
They checked their TV, their cable box, took it to other tvs, and everything assuming that it couldnt be the ouya being just totally Meh.