Consumer VR is off to a bit of a rocky start. Both Oculus and HTC’s hardware were reviewed rather favorably, and that’s nice, but getting your hands on either one has proven to be harder than it should be (especially considering the price). HTC and Oculus both experienced delays in shipment early on, but now it looks like things are worse than we thought for Oculus. By the sound of it, if you were to place an order for a Rift this very afternoon, it may be fall by the time you actually receive it.
Many early adopters who pre-ordered the Rift, expecting it to show up on launch day (March 28), were disappointed to learn that their shipment had been pushed back to April. Now those same pre-orders, processed in some cases months ago, are due to ship out next month instead. No matter how you look at it, this launch was a failure. If you place an order on launch day, and that order is processed, you shouldn’t have to wait 2-3 months for your product to arrive.
Oculus customer support stated the following on the Oculus subreddit (via Polygon ): “Kickstarter Backers, we’re changing your Order History to show ‘TBD’ instead of the date as that date was applicable to the time in which we imported the orders. We’ve already fulfilled a large number of the orders and more are being fulfilled on a regular cadence. Your Rifts are from a different allocation.” That’s an interesting way of saying “Sorry, we f#$@*d up. Please don’t cancel your pre-order.” Here’s hoping Sony is learning some extremely valuable lessons for the October launch of PSVR.