‘We want indie retailers,’ says Oculus

Oculus has vowed to support indie retailers with the upcoming launch of its VR headset.

Speaking to MCV, the firm’s head of content Jason Rubin said Oculus is committed to supporting all retailers – not just the big ones such as GAME, Tesco and Amazon.

However, he concedes, the bigger outlets may have more luck in terms of showing off the hardware.

We’re more than happy to support indie retail,” Rubin said.

We’re a company that four years ago was just one person, so we have a lot of affinity with those guys.

We need to be careful. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves at launch (in terms of available stock), so we’re being very careful to not make promises we can’t keep. The worst thing would be to tell an indie store they can sell a product and not be able to ship them enough stock because we underestimated the demand from big retailers. In the long run, we want to support everyone.”

He continued: For a long time, you are going to see VR demos be a big part of the retail experience. Retailers are extremely eager to do them. Some of the smaller stores are frustrated because if you have a small footprint, it’s hard for them to clear enough space. It really does help to be a big store where you have a huge amount of space so you can do demos.”

Oculus Rift will be launching at UK physical retail on Tuesday, September 20th.