Ouja was always going to be a niche market appealing to techies and gamers.
Niche market, yes, but it seems like one of Ouya's (the company's) biggest problems was that they thought that they could appeal to "gamers."
If you consider yourself a gamer, then you probably already own one of the big-name consoles. Recent consoles have a fair amount of support for the kind of indie games that Ouya was hoping would form the backbone of their library, and so there's not much of a strong incentive to get an Ouya as well. And it was obvious that the big game studios were never going to develop major games for Ouya, so getting one instead of a normal console wouldn't have been a good choice.
I got one soon after release, and it's great for someone who likes to play the occasional game, but not enough to bother investing hundreds of dollars in a standard console. But anyone who thought that it was going to compete in the same space as the XBox or Playstation was fooling themselves.