It is a little strange, but I think it's also a product of how it came to be. It began as a post on a hobbyist 3d headset forum. The guy piqued the interest of

It is a little strange, but I think it's also a product of how it came to be. It began as a post on a hobbyist 3d headset forum. The guy piqued the interest of John Carmack, who started developing for and promoting it, in tandem with a re-release of a doom game which worked with its specs. It generated a bunch of buzz, so the initial guy was going to put it on Kickstarter to get better deals on some of the components. Regarding the Kickstarter cut, there was a forum-only Paypal 'gift' donation a couple weeks ago to avoid that, but it wouldn't have been enough. Plus, the rift developer wanted to launch on Kickstarter ahead of Quakecon for the publicity of it all. This was scheduled to be a couple weeks ago, but then in a flurry, Palmer, the developer of the rift, got a bunch of meetings with some game companies and it's been kind of madness since. Looking back, it may have been better to work with those companies first, but before he could even get in touch, he drummed up all this interest, and now we've all been waiting on the Kickstarter, I think he feels compelled to launch the Kickstarter anyway, since that was the original plan. As for headaches: John Carmack demonstrated the rift at this year's E3 and the reviews were almost uniformly positive. edit: I'm not involved, just have been excited about it for a long time and pledged today.