Oculus Rift customers face shipping delays, HTC Vive makes optimistic promises
VR waiting.
There continue to be hold-ups fulfilling pre-orders of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality headsets.
Oculus Rift customers were told to wait for a shipping update on 12th April to find out when their headsets would arrive, so they now know. But most are now looking at an arrival date significantly - months - later than their original given forecast.
"Received my April 12th update," wrote Zoma on the Oculus forum. "Early-to-mid May for an 8:06 purchase (US) with a March estimate and the 1-3 weeks email on 03/24 :(.
"Guess the email meant 1 to 3 months :(."
"Mine says [9th-19th May]," added mfabrizio21 - one of many people adding similar comments. "I had mine purchased within the first 10 minutes. Disappointing. My Vive is coming in April sometime. Hopefully there's some better games in May."
The emails from Oculus to customers continue to mention "component shortages" as reason for the delays.
Kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift, meanwhile, experienced some even more severe delays, but Oculus later explained this to be an error.
"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," Oculus subreddit official TheTwistgibber announced.
HTC Vive pre-order customers are also experiencing delays. A Shipment Update blog post, updated at the beginning of this week (Monday, 11th April), remained optimistic, and said, "Your Vive system will be shipped in the month noted in your order confirmation email."
HTC Vive's bigwig Daniel O'Brien took to Twitter to reinforce this message and said, "On track to deliver all April pre-orders in April."
Someone replied that that sounded impossible.
"Challenge accepted," returned O'Brien. Then, in the wee hours of this morning: "Will be a good week globally for our Vive customers.
"Hope people can be a little patient. We're committed to meeting our promise of delivering in April and addressing issues reported."
Judging by responses on Reddit, some people are getting shipping confirmation from delivery companies, which means some units are going out, but how many, and how widespread geographically, is hard to gauge. There remains plenty of scepticism about the solidity of O'Brien's promises.
If you're a Rift or Vive customer, or both, we'd like to hear from you below. Has your order been fulfilled, delayed, or is it now suddenly on its way?
Digital Foundry has reviewed both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headset, in case you're thinking of buying, or just curious.