Just this past Tuesday, HTC released a blog post which stated that in “an effort to clear up speculation and misinformation” they wanted to clarify the release timeframe for the Vive had shifted to April 2016. Today, in a very curious move, HTC has edited the same blog post to add a very particular piece of information (in bold):
We will be starting the new year by making an additional 7,000 units available to developers, with pre-orders from the end of February followed by commercial availability in April 2016. We are incredibly excited about the future and look forward to sharing more information as we move forward towards launch.
That’s right, the same company that made a big bold statement on stage about releasing a product just announced pre-orders with a minor update to a two-day old blog. This isn’t reality, people, it is virtual reality.
Our only guesses are that this is either a huge mistake made by a member of the HTC Vive’s PR team, or is somewhat purposeful gamesmanship on the part of HTC. Earlier today Oculus, who for all intents and purposes are their competition, announced the massive AAA-level title, EVE: Valkyrie, would ship bundled “exclusively” with pre-orders for the system (no dates for pre-orders were announced).
We have reached out to HTC for comment and will report back as soon as we hear anything.
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UPDATE (12/10/15 @ 3:49PM PST): An HTC rep has confirmed the preorder date via email, looks like this is a real thing.
