How can you call this a scam or a fraud when they've actually delivered an alpha build of the game?
It may be an incompetently run project by people who have no idea what they're doing and are subsequently running way behind schedule.....but to say it's a fraud implies willful deception with intent to never deliver.
Well, they were supposed to ship the final game in February, and as the Kickstarter was in February, that means the game should have been near complete, with almost no work left (which is basically where they said they were in their Kickstarter - in final beta stages).
They already shipped [Ouya] devkits on time. That's "deliver" to me.
Actually, they haven't shipped Ouya dev kits yet - they announced that they were still on schedule to ship them at the end of December and showed pictures of the PC board and case from the factory. It's still possible (though unlikely) that they won't ship any. And while the dev consoles are a good start, it's still only 800 or so of those 60,000 units, and those special hand-assembled prototypes, so even if they ship those 800 it's still possible that the rest will ship late or even not at all.
I mean if they do manage to release on time that's just the start of the problem. A console with a small 50,000 userbase, fragmenting android even more, piracy is probably gonna be rife...I'm just not sure who is going to bother with it at all
Not to get too technical, but that 60,000 userbase is far bigger than any other game console has ever had, considering those are 100% paid off systems over 6 months before release. At this point in the Wii U's lifetime (3 months before launch), the userbase was zero - there were preorders by this point, but those aren't sales, just "reserve me a game console in case I want to (and can afford to) buy one when it launches".
Boxer8 has also been taking normal online preorders in addition to do those 60,000 units, and of course will be sold in retail stores like GameStop a couple months later.