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Oculus Rift launch turns disastrous as preorders are delayed for months

Updated Apr 12th, 2016 5:04PM EDT
Oculus Rift Launch Shipping Delays

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The virtual reality future is off to a rocky start.

Shortly after the Rift launched late last month, Oculus had to inform many of its customers that their Rift orders would be delayed due to an “unexpected component shortage.” Although the shipping cost for any delayed orders was waived, it appears that this was just the first in a string of issues.

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On Monday night, an Oculus customer support representative visited the Oculus subreddit with more bad news for Kickstarter backers:

“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.”

Many Oculus Rift preorders have been fulfilled, as the message states above, but countless others have been delayed by weeks or even months, with some preorders expected to arrive as late as August. Polygon says that several members of its staff placed their orders for the Rift within minutes of the preorders going live, but the shipping estimates on their orders now show May or June.

As expected, customers aren’t happy with these developments:

We’ll keep an eye out for any further updates on the situation.

UPDATE: Oculus provided the following statement regarding the delays:

“The component shortage impacted our quantities more than we expected, and we’ve updated the shipment window to reflect these changes. We apologize for the delay.

We’re delivering Rifts to customers every day, and we’re focused on getting Rifts out the door as fast as we can. We’ve taken steps to address the component shortage, and we’ll continue shipping in higher volumes each week. We’ve also increased our manufacturing capacity to allow us to deliver in higher quantities, faster. Many Rifts will ship less than four weeks from original estimates, and we hope to beat the new estimates we’ve provided.”

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.