Oculus Referral program issues: Rift codes are temporarily suspended (Update: they have been resumed)

Close to Black Friday, Oculus has launched a cool referral program, that lets you give a special code to a friend of yours so that both you and he/she will get discounts and store credit. This is awesome, but actually, at the type of writing, there are three small big problems that I want to warn you about.

Oculus Referral Program

Speaking in details, the referral program works this way: you know a friend that wants to buy an Oculus Rift or Oculus Go. To incentivize him to buy the VR headset, you can go to the Oculus Referrals page, log in into your Oculus account and then follow the procedure there to send via e-mail the referral link to your friend or get directly a code to send in another way (e.g. Whatsapp) to your peers.

If your friend will use the code, he/she will have a 10% discount on the purchase of the VR device. But there’s even more: 30 days after the shipment of the headset, you will get $30 Oculus store credit if your friend bought a Rift and $20 if he/she bought a Go! This credit is not eternal: you have one year to spend that money to buy some awesome games and/or DLCs.

Every user can send at maximum 3 invites, and every invite code can be used only once.

This program is awesome, because it offers a win-win both for who sends the invite and who receives it, but as I’ve said there are currently some little problems you should know.

US Only

Yes, as always, this is something that is US first. When I try to log into my Referrals page from Italy, I get this message.

So, only people from the US can generate codes. And that’s really a nuisance… I don’t even get why this is US only: legal reasons? Did they want to test this program in the home country first? For sure Oculus has its reasons, but I’m quite sad because I would have loved to give codes to my friends to let them buy VR headsets… that’s a pity.

Anyway, as far as I understand, people from all over the world can use the purchase codes. So, if you want to have a discount, you have to find an American friend to send you a referral.

No refund?

While browsing Reddit, I found a post of a Redditor complaining about the fact that he lost 2 of his 3 referral codes. How? Well, basically he lost the first one sending it to the wrong e-mail and the second one by placing the order on the device sending it to a hotel, something that is not allowed.

Oculus support didn’t help him in having back the codes he already used in the wrong way. So basically, he used two codes, but no one was used for a successful purchase, but they have been deactivated anyway. It seems that if you use an invite, it is gone for good, and you can’t use it anymore… even if actually the code hasn’t be used for an actual purchase. His one is quite an edge case, but I warn you to be careful when using referral invites/codes.

Rift shutdown

UPDATE: This issue has been fixed some days after the publishing of this article, as stated by Road To VR.

So, you are from the US, you are sure you won’t waste your codes and you want absolutely to generate a code to make a friend of yours buy a Rift so that she can play Robo Recall. It sounds good, doesn’t it?

My friend Virtual Reels has made me notice that it is not possible to generate invites for Rift anymore. If you try to generate a code, you receive a predefined message like this one:

We have reached the maximum number of referrals available for today. Please try again tomorrow.

Anyway, at whatever time and day people try, the message is always that one. So that “tomorrow” is related to the day after some day in the 3020 maybe 😀

It seems that Oculus Rift referral codes are finished. And at the time of writing, the program has not been re-opened yet. Someone says that the cause of this may be that VR enthusiasts have organized themselves too well: on Reddit, there is a megathread of people exchanging invites and referral codes. This smart organization inside communities has made referral codes be distributed too fast and so Oculus has temporarily shut down the program for Rift. I tried contacting Oculus asking if and when the program will be restored, but I got no answer.

Anyway, existing codes of people generating them before the shutdown are still valid: you can still find some of them in the above linked Reddit megathread: if one works for you… well, you have a 10% discount for your Oculus Rift!

All of the above doesn’t hold for Oculus Go: referrals are still working very good for it.

And that’s it. I just wanted to warn you about the little problems that there are currently with Oculus Referrals. I love this referral idea of Oculus and so I hope that the program will be expanded to all countries and that Rift codes will be available again. Come on Oculus, you can do it! 🙂

(Header image by Oculus)