Best Buy Gets Oculus VR

Best Buy will sell the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headsets at some of its retail stores starting Saturday.

Oculus is making its $600 headsets available at the stores even though many who ordered them directly from Oculus have yet to receive them, more than a month after the company started shipping the headsets. Oculus has blamed the delays on an "unexpected component shortage."

To appease people who ordered the Rift early, Oculus says stores will prioritize those customers if they show up to buy one. They will need to then cancel the original orders.

Oculus said Monday that a "small number" of the headsets will be available at 48 Best Buy stores initially, with more coming this summer. They will also be available online from Microsoft and Amazon, but not on Best Buy's website, starting Friday. Until now, the headsets have been available only through advance orders made directly with Oculus.

Oculus has gotten a lot of the early VR buzz, in part because Facebook bought the company two years ago for $2 billion, signaling a long bet on VR technology that the company hopes will go well beyond gaming. But the Rift is losing some of that early advantage. Some games originally designed to be Oculus exclusives have been unofficially modified to work on the HTC Vive, which launched about a week after the Rift, but hasn't experienced shipping delays.