Me too, I just hope the price won't go up before I can place my order.

I'm in Germany I it is showing for me directly under the "Reservierung stornieren" Button:

Für Sie voraussichtlich bestellbar: Zwischen jetzt und 30.Dezember.2026

I somehow thought that reservation queue meant getting it within the first few weeks.

Same here! It seems to me the wording for the reservation queue description naturally gave this impression. I think Valve could have done a much better job with messaging...

My understanding is that the reservation queue is a mix of "we have a specific physical unit assigned to your name" and "we have a manufacturing order placed, of which one of the units is assigned to you". Whereas waitlist is more "we haven't even placed the order yet to manufacture your unit, so we can't guarantee it will even get made".

So the distinction is more about the likelihood of ever getting one.

I interpret the queue as having an actual ranking to it, whereas the waitlist does not. So if you're in the queue, you have some unknown position in the order. If you're in the waitlist, it's just an unordered list where you have a random chance of being periodically added to the end of the queue.

As an anti-scalping measure it has some value since people who got in early would have a large advantage otherwise, but perhaps the queue itself is a bit too long and should have been restricted to something close to "definitely coming this year".

I believe this is specifically for the reservation queue (not the waiting list). Sorry it's not better news...

Why even bother with the whole waitlist/reservation thing in the first place?

Disincentivize scalpers.

I was put on the waitlist and until today I still had a little bit of hope I'd be able to purchase one this year. Haha, nope. I'll just resign myself to probably never getting one at this point.

"Waitlist" feels redundant with these timelines. I wonder what their plan was, really: "Let's create this game-changing headset, but only manufacture and sell a couple thousand of it. Yeah, that'll change the whole market for VR!"

Valve definitely dropped the ball on communication, but there is a real distinction between the lists.

The reservation list likely ties to guaranteed inventory. This would cover everything from warehouse stock to parts awaiting manufacturing and/or assembly, RAM being the probable bottleneck. As long as a full bill of materials is confirmed and finalized, Valve would consider those allocatable units.

The waitlist would then be all demand beyond that, and since Valve might not have RAM or storage obtained for them, those people might see a price increase.

Now I can see that I'm in the 2027 group as well.

🤜🤛

That was also my understanding. Having people wait for months on the reservation queue makes it meaningless vs the waiting list. How little stock did they actually have I wonder.

This news seems to suggest that the wait list might take a very long time (many months, possibly more than a year) to service?

If you're lucky, there will be an OLED version until then.

I declined too, as I expected to wait longer (like with the steam machine). Couldn't swallow spending so much in a short timeframe, thought i'd have more time.