Oculus delays some Rift pre-orders by more than a month

Scorpus

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Many people who pre-ordered an Oculus Rift at launch have received bad news today: their virtual reality headset has been delayed, and won't be shipping out for more than a month due to component shortages.

The delays appear to have affected even those who pre-ordered the Rift within hours of it going on sale. New shipping dates that many customers are receiving range from May to late June, while the first batch of Rifts shipping at the end of March. If you place an order for a Rift right now, you won't receive the headset until August at the earliest.

In a statement, an Oculus spokesperson said that the "component shortage impacted our quantities more than we expected." The company has "taken steps to address the component shortage" and they've also increased manufacturing capacity to attempt to speed up the shipment process.

Anyone affected by the delays will get their $50 shipping fee waived by Oculus, and the company won't be charging customers for the unit itself until it ships out.

As for people who bought a Rift through Kickstarter, Oculus says these customers will get headsets from a "separate allocation", but it's not clear if the production delays also affect these units. Shipping estimates for Kickstarter buyers have been updated to "TBD", which isn't very helpful.

There are quite a number of Oculus customers who are frustrated at these delays, many of whom have taken to Reddit to slam the company for failing to properly estimate and plan for large demand. Hopefully Oculus can get its production line sorted out as soon as possible so that delays don't affect even more customers.

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No point in pre-ordering anything if they don't look at the orders before release date. Would have been better if they took some pre-orders, made devices based on those orders, and after that decide what would be realistic release date. It's nice that they made one consumer happy just for marketing not realizing the other 99.9% of customers will be pissed off and buy a competitive product. And the bad pr won't do any good either.

If valve and HTC just put more money in and actually make their product hit the shelves first they will win vr battle.
 
Mine was suppose to ship in May, I received the email this morning that everyone else did...my new estimated ship date shows to be early July. That definitely sucks but I'm not too worried about it, the shipping will be free and that'll allow me to buy a game instead of paying shipping costs. Looking forward to both Vive and Oculus!

- Alabama Man

I do believe HTC and Valve have a good chance at winning. I think the sooner and quicker Valve and HTC come up with more content the better their chances. However I do think they would need to do that before the Oculus controllers release. Those paired with another sensor will make the experience the same, all other specs are basically the same regarding the headsets. Valve has the upper hand at the moment with their controllers but the content is lacking and Oculus has the one up at the moment there. I think it's a race between more Vive content and Oculus releasing their controllers. If it costs $100 for an extra sensor (which would allow for standing/moving play) and $100 for the Oculus controllers that would put the systems on an equal playing field price wise and both $800 respectively. Of course those prices are up in the air they could charge half that or double that...I expect it to be competitive!
 
I received an e-mail telling me mine "should" now be shipping the first week of July, so I cancelled my order.
 
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