In an update to the company’s blog today, HTC has announced that the Vive VR headset for Valve’s SteamVR platform will be delayed until April 2016.
Announcing back in March that the HTC Vive would launch to consumers starting in Q4 2015—beating Oculus’ Q1 2016 release date—was ambitious, and perhaps a bit too much so for HTC and Valve.
Now HTC says that the Vive will not see commercial availability until April 2016, putting the Vive release date just into Q2 2016. So long as Oculus sticks to their Q1 2016 window, they may indeed be the first of the major VR headsets to hit the market.
The company has also confirmed that they’ll be launching a “second generation” of the HTC Vive dev kit at CES in January.
“In an effort to clear up speculation and misinformation surrounding the launch of HTC Vive this month we are excited to give the community an update on the status of HTC Vive. We remain committed to delivering the HTC Vive to a broader group of content creators and partners, and remain focused on delivering the very best experience possible for a consumer release,” HTC writes on its blog.
In addition to an April 2016 release date for the HTC Vive, the company says they’ll be making 7,000 additional developer kits available in the beginning of 2016. This jives with an earlier announcement by partner Valve, saying that the bulk of Vive units would ship in 2016.
The announcement is a delay, but ‘April’ also now the smallest release window yet announced among the major headsets. Oculus continues to maintain a release date of Q1 2016 while Sony says that PlayStation VR will launch in Q2. None of the three headsets have been priced.
