There’s been a serious demand for pre-orders of the consumer Oculus Rift since going live Wednesday, and if you haven’t thrown your credit card at Oculus yet, you may be waiting until as late as June to get your hands on one.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tweeted before pre-orders went live Wednesday that there’s “no chance of Rift pre-orders ‘selling out’ [and] we will keep taking pre-orders for a long as people want EVE: Valkyrie.”
This was however before a massive outpouring of support sent the pre-order queue back to June. The first wave of Rifts are due on March 28th to customers in over 20 countries.
Luckey told Polygon in an interview that “[w]e sold through a lot faster than we expected […] I can’t talk about numbers, but we sold through in 10 minutes what I thought we were going to sell through in a few hours, which is one of the reasons the site was beginning to buckle.”
In fact, web traffic to Oculus’ store front was so heavy when the pre-order counter finally hit 00:00, the site went down for more than a few tense minutes.
There is a small silver lining in the mad rush for pre-orders though. Some customers “may see their ship date move forward as fraudulent orders are weeded out,” said Luckey. Customers yet to pre-order may not be so fortunate though, as the June ship date has held since this morning.