There’s much money to be made in scalping. We often see this with devices that are in demand, particularly with new iPhones and iPads. People purchase more than they really need and then sell off those units when there’s a supply shortage. Since the product is in demand some people are willing to pay even a couple of hundreds dollars over the actual price. Scalpers have been doing the same with Oculus Rift. Due to “extreme reseller purchases” the Facebook owned company has been forced to suspend sales of its developer kit in China.
Oculus has still not released a variant of its virtual reality headset that’s meant for the public. It just recently started shipping DK2, an updated version of its original development kit. Over 100,000 developer kit sales have already been logged which makes it safe to say that the developer community has adequate interest in this device.
A company spokesperson responded to a thread on reddit about many DK2 orders being cancelled in China without any reason. The spokesperson said that Oculus is doing what it can to make sure that scalpers looking to flip its product for a profit are not taking stock away from legitimate developer purchases globally.
Oculus is now looking into alternative ways to sell the development kit to legitimate developers in China. For everyone else the spokesperson says that they’ll have to wait for the consumer version of Rift, which will be “worth the wait.”
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