Check your inbox Oculus Rift users. If you were impacted by the recent service outage (due to a certificate error), then chances are you’ll have an email from Oculus. Just as they said they would, they have credited affected users with store credits.
The value of the credit is US$15 or, and here’s the important piece, local currency equivalent. When I checked my account this morning in Aussie dollars, I find there’s a nice A$20 credit, thanks Oculus. If I run a currency converter run now, the actual USD to AUD conversion lands at just A$19.09 so it seems Oculus are rounding up which is great.
While service outages are certainly frustrating, I feel like this is a nice level of compensation for the outage. If you were in the middle of a pitch to investors about the latest Rift app you’ve developed and didn’t get funding as a result, it’ll feel like pocket change, but for regular users, you couldn’t use your device for a few hours and now you’ve been compensated.
For Oculus this credit per user, multiplied by the number of users will add up to a significant number. It certainly won’t send the Facebook-owned company broke, but it’s a healthy reminder to focus on service availability, or there’ll be a financial penalty to pay.
I think a lot of companies could learn a thing or two from how Oculus has dealt with this unfortunate event.
