Looks like China is going to miss out on the Oculus Rift Dev Kit for a while after scalpers tried buying up massive amounts of stock. Pre-orders and shipments have been suspended for all orders in China due to what Oculus VR are calling “extreme reseller purchases.”
China has been completely removed from the DK2 pre-order page and this has sparked buyers to take to Reddit to voice their complaints that existing pre-orders were cancelled. This is most likely due to the fact that it became impossible to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate orders, but it’s still a pretty drastic move from Oculus regardless.
“Yes, it is a bummer that we’ve had to suspend sales in China due to extreme reseller purchases,” said Kevin Crawford, Oculus Customer Service Lead. “We need to make sure that we are doing what we can to make sure that resellers that are looking to flip our product for a profit are not taking stock away from legitimate developer purchases globally. Our product, in its current form, is a developer kit, meant for developers that develop VR content. We are looking into alternative ways to make sure that our development kits are getting into legitimate developer hands in China.”
With DK2 set to ship later this month it’s no doubt a massive blow to developers who live and work in China, but hopefully Oculus can pull something together as soon as possible to help those who genuinely need the hardware for development.
