The Oculus Rift’s big launch week has been dampened a bit by the fact there apparently just aren’t that many headsets to go around. A lot of people who preordered have no real idea when their headset might ship, and Oculus has been mostly silent on what’s going on.
That changed somewhat yesterday, when Oculus founder Palmer Luckey posted a few updates about the Rift shipping situation. First of all, he Tweeted an update that was really just a screenshot of a previous update:
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) March 31, 2016
When asked for more specifics he responded with a screenshot of the screenshot:
The Oculus subreddit has been an unusual mixture of excitement and discontent this week, and has been home to many threads complaining about the lack of shipping information. Luckey turned up there yesterday in response to a thread directly addressing him and asking for more info:
Don’t shunt blame to other people, this is my call. I am not going to wax poetic about this, since I have done so in the past, but bottom-line: I won’t give in-depth updates on any situation without knowing it is solid, true, and finalised. Until I can do so, the best I can do is remind people that I will get them information as quickly as I can.
On the rare occasions when things still change, even when they change for reasons out of my control, I get crucified anyway. Sometimes that means updates have to wait until things get locked down, and sometimes that means waiting a little longer to give everyone good info.
In another later thread, he got a little more prickly, pointing out that the subreddit was not indicative of Oculus’ actual reach or audience:
Imagine how much more different this sub would be 1000s of people had rifts instead of the handful now. Not very different, apparently, because there are already many thousands of Rifts out there even at this early point, with more arriving as we speak. Remember that this sub[reddit] is a tiny minority of the overall VR market – 70k is not even an accurate measure, considering how many subs are from old accounts or lurkers with no headset. The vast majority of people don’t care about posting pictures or reviews of their new toy to an internet enthusiast group.
Luckey sounds frustrated with all the complaining, which is understandable — I’m sure everyone at Oculus is doing what they can to get headsets to everyone, and that they’d love nothing more than for their neat gizmo to be in the public’s hands ASAP.
He’s also probably right that lots of the people who have Rifts don’t post on the Oculus subreddit… but the fact remains that a lot of people who post there are hardcore fans who preordered within the first ten minutes and feel totally in the dark about when their headset might ship.
The bigger issue is that Oculus appears to have no substantive customer service apparatus in place to deal with complaints and give out detailed information to individuals, and that fans’ main source of new information has been a few Tweets and reddit posts from the company’s founder. It does sound as though some people are starting to receive the Rifts they ordered, however, so hopefully more will ship in the near future.
Comments
7 responses to “Oculus Founder Responds To Late Shipping Complaints”
Just admit you were too busy doing your stupid Alaska PR drop-off to care, champ. Honesty always goes down better then “well, you guys smell bad”.
this is the 21st century man! we don’t need some pesky customer relations! everyone knows not saying anything is better then saying “sorry, looks like we under evaluated our initial production requirements, yours will be shipped as soon as its made.”
If they have been sent out then it is no longer their responsibility and is the couriers issues. If they have not fulfilled all the orders then those unfulfilled ones are OR responsibilities. Reading this article I can’t really tell what the situation is as it seems to be literally just about Luckey’s own quips and not about shipping issues.
According to one thread by a supposed insider, it was down to something screwing up with processing payments, and some kind of contractual reason why they can’t say anything about it yet.
Just checked my order again and I noticed they have now removed the Freight and Tax portion of the price. It’s now just coming in at $649 USD for my Australian order.
Not sure what this means…
Were you already charged on your card? Or is that part yet to come?
No charge till it ships so nothing yet.
I’d say they are negotiating a new courier which may be what is causing the delay.
People are frustrated because Palmer advised that we would get more granular shipping dates “soon” 2 weeks after the Oculus became available for preorder. i.e. Late-January, he advised we would get more specific shipping dates. This never happened.
Late-Feb, he again advised that we would be getting the shipping dates soon after they weeded out all the “fake” or “bad” orders from the ordering mishap back in January.
Then he came up with that tweet in March advising we would get an update on our shipping dates, well before the Rifts would ship.
It is now April. Not only do we not have the “shipping date” that was advised we would be getting “soon” back in January. A lot of people who ordered the Rift during the first few minutes orders became available, were advised they would get their Rift in March, which they haven’t.
So not only is it poor communication, but the wrong and misleading information. Sure, circumstances change, shit happens, but at least have the balls to say when something has not gone to plan.