GDC 2018 roundup oculus go

Oculus referral codes are now available outside of the US!

I was browsing the “[GDI] Virtual Reality” group on facebook, and I noticed that someone told that Oculus now allows for referral codes. I was like “yeah, I know, they are available since a lot, but they are a US-only feature” and was about to pass on.

But then, I remembered that after I updated my Oculus runtime, I could now see a “My referral” button, that wasn’t there with my previous version of the Oculus app. So, I decided to give it a try… and with much surprise, I noticed that actually now I am able to send referral codes to friends and families!

oculus referrals outside USA
A wild new button has appeared in my Oculus desktop app…
What are Oculus referral codes and how do they work?

Referral codes are a great strategy started by Oculus to increase the sales of its headsets. If you are the owner of an Oculus headset and advise a friend of yours to buy an Oculus device, he/she gets a discount on the hardware and you get credit to buy games on the store. So, everyone is happy: you get games, your friend gets a discount, and Oculus gets a new customer. This means that most people having a Rift or a Go will for sure advise all the people they know to buy other Rifts or Go, and so Oculus becomes always more successful.

If you need further details on how it works, these are the official rules:

When your friend purchases Oculus Rift or Oculus Go through your invitation, they will get 10% off their purchase. 30 days following the date your friend’s order is shipped, you’ll automatically get € 30.00 in Oculus Store credit for an Oculus Rift referral or € 20.00 in Oculus Store credit for an Oculus Go referral, applicable towards any software title. Limit 5 monthly invites per user.

Oculus Store credits have no cash value, can only be used for purchases of digital content in the Oculus Store, and expire one year from date of issuance. Subject to full terms at oculus.com/legal/store-credits/. You will not receive Oculus Store credit in the event a purchase made through your invitation is returned within thirty (30) days of date of purchase.

Referral codes are currently available for Rift and Go devices. I guess that in the future, they will be available for Quest as well… but there is no official confirmation about it.

Once only US users were able to generate referral codes, but now it seems that this has been extended to many other countries as well. So now I will be able to get some extra credit also from my lovely Italy. Another great thing is that once there was the limit of 3 referral per person, while now every user can generate up to 5 referral codes each month.

If Oculus has extended the rules for referral, it means that they are working very well and are taking many new people in Facebook’s ecosystem.

How do you obtain your referral codes?

It is dead simple:

  1. Go to Oculus’s My Referrals page;
  2. Login to your Oculus account, if you weren’t logged in yet;
  3. Specify what product you want to invite your friend to buy;
  4. Write the e-mail address of your friend;
  5. Click Send Invitation.
oculus referrals how to
The Referrals page. As you can see, using it is very simple

At this point, your friend should receive an e-mail with the code and the instructions on how to redeem it. When he/she will buy its Oculus device using the code provided, you will obtain your store credit.

What if you want to buy a new Oculus device, but you don’t have a friend to ask a code to? Well… head to /r/Oculus subreddit and look for the Referral codes megathread It is a forum thread where people exchange freely their referrals.


I hope this post has been useful for you, and if it is the case, please share it and also subscribe to my newsletter! And after that… if you need a referral code, just let me know!

(Header image by Road To VR)


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