Oculus Rift preorders are supposed to reach their clients in a little more than a month, but the manufacturing company announced that "a small number" of preorders were cancelled.
Users from multiple countries were told that their Oculus Rift order simply does not comply with the company's availability program. This means that some buyers wanted their VR headset shipped to an unsupported country or had problems matching the billing and postal address.
VR enthusiasts were able to order Oculus in 20 countries, initially.
"A small number of preorders were unable to be processed and as a result were canceled," Oculus tells TechCrunch. The company advises customers to reach out to its support teams for any questions regarding their order.
After the announcement, Twitter and Reddit saw long threads of complaints from users who claim were unjustly caught in the cancellation net. Some of them say that they preordered the device during a vacation overseas, whereas others make it clear that their only mistake was having different shipping/billing addresses.
The company responded to the uproar via Reddit user William_VR, who posted under the thread "Order cancelled??" William_VR assured all Oculus clients (scraped or not) that the company does all it can to solve the problematic situation, case by case.
"We're aware that there are questions on preorders and cancellations and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused," he says.
He goes on to add that the Oculus support page offers assistance to users and can answer all questions regarding the orders.
Preorders for Oculus debuted at the beginning of the year. Despite its hefty $600 price, the device caught momentum and secured quite a number of preorders. Read more about the Oculus Rift in our coverage, where we break down its features, availability and bundles.
One company can benefit from the hiccup: HTC and its Vive, one of the main rivals of Oculus Rift.
The HTC Vive goes up for preorder next week, with shipping dates scheduled for April. What is more, the Vive will be present in the Chinese market, something that Oculus was reluctant to do.
Oculus has the upper hand when it comes to time spent developing the headset, but HTC Vive gets strong backing from gaming company Valve.
We will keep you posted on the future of VR headset developments, so stay tuned.
