It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for "hackers" but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they're finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there's no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play... or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.