Original Ouya Kickstarter Backers Left Hanging Without Pre-Orders

Updated: June 26, 2013

One of the most successful Kickstarters ever to appear on the indie fund-raising project website would have to go to the famous, Android-based, set-top console Ouya. Ouyas name has been heard, mentioned, and talked about for almost a year now and the popularity of the product is definitely growing day by day.

The kick starter campaign raised $8.5 million dollars and become the second-highest-earning project in history. One of the rewards to become a backer promises a console shipment to your home before anybodies…well at least for some people it seems.

The first shipment of Ouya were dispersed on March 28th 2013 for the very first backers and from then on it was based on a first-come, first-serve biases. As of today, June 25th, 2013 some backers of the project have yet to receive their promised set-top console but some non-backers such as Amazon and Best Buy seemed to receive their consoles perfectly fine. As backers are still long awaiting their dreamed about console, anyone can just enter a Best Buy today and purchase a Ouya to rub it in his/her face. Isn’t this a Kickstarter backers worst nightmare?

Kotaku has reported that in a letter that was released earlier this month, the issue of such late shipments are due to complications with a shipping partner which has affected nearly 7,500 backers. It is reported that their Ouya can be shipped as late as two weeks and arrive as late as mid-July. “I am pissed,” wrote CEO Julie Uhrman. “ I did not promise to ship to most of you before we hit store shelves. I promised to ship to all of you” Earlier today, Ouya’s Ken Stephens gave an update on Facebook promising that many consoles will be shipped from a facility in Hong Kong which can result in a longer wait.

Ouya says most of the people who are facing this problem reside outside the US, which can make communication difficult and shipping times longer but it doesn’t stop there. Many tech review sites have reported that the console came to their doorstep with various bugs and problems. This may have been only the first shipment Ouya and might have already been updated but still a far-from-perfect launch to say the least.

The worst part of this whole situation is that there’s people who believed in the product and sheded out the money for it and now their losing the only reason to back something up on Kickstarter, priority over the public. Most of these individuals were confident of an early shipment as anyone else should be when dealing with Kickstarter projects but with such a big name in the crowd sourcing community now, it is such an embarrassment to receive this kind of publicity and to make it worse, the consoles are in-stores! What do you guys think about this? Was this a total fail on Ouya? Let us know with a comment down below!