Hoping for an Oculus Rift pre-order in your stocking this year? I hate to be the one to leave coal instead, so I’ll let Luckey share the news instead.
@PalmerLuckey Preorders are coming soon after new year. Enjoy a stress-free holiday, we won't launch preorders without warning!
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) December 22, 2015
That’s right, the much-anticipated Oculus Rift won’t be open for pre-ordering until some time “soon after the new year,” but there’s some good news. The Rift is still confirmed for a Q1 2016 launch, and Luckey’s tweets imply that even pre-orders are on schedule, including that as an afterthought to the first tweet.
Development has continued at a rapid click, spurred on in part by Facebook’s absorption of Oculus. The second version of the development kick sold out a few months ago, causing the price to temporarily shoot up on the secondary market. There hasn’t been another publicly available version since.
However, Oculus recently started to ship the final version of the headset, as well as version 1.0 of the SDK, to developers. This led to new speculation that pre-orders may be just around the corner, as unlikely as a December 22nd launch might seem, which is probably why Luckey decided to to squash the rumors.
But followers of VR’s progress have been waiting patiently for pre-orders to open, so they could become the first adopters of a new and revolutionary technology. Other headsets are on the way too, like the HTC Vive and OSVR, but the Rift has become a household name in VR tech, and its success could make or break the market.
Lucky signs off and wishes everyone a stress-free holiday, noting that there will be plenty of warning before the pre-orders actually open. There’s no word on pricing yet, although Luckey has said the consumer headset will cost more than the $350 dev kit 2. It will include an Xbox One controller and Eve: Valkyrie, a space dogfighting simulator that’s been in development since the early days of the Rift.
