After five years of waiting, Sixense will refund its VR controller Kickstarter backers

After five years, Sixense is refunding all Kickstarter users who backed the Sixense Stem, a virtual reality motion controller which was first pitched back in 2013.

With companies like HTC and Oculus developing its own motion controllers, it's becoming more difficult for third-party console ventures to really take off in the VR market.

The decision to refund all backers came about because the company struggled to produce Stem for the mass-market.

Sixense deciding against moving on with the mass-market consumer hardware to focus on the enterprise and health market instead.

As reported by VentureBeat, the Sixense Kickstarter campaign raised $604,978 and CEO Amir Rubin says Sixense raised an additional $500,000 more through preorders.

The company reportedly shipped a small number of prototypes to large backers, but never shipped any production units of the Stem controllers.

After forming a joint venture with healthcare company Penumbra earlier this year to produce 6DoF technology for training applications like VR surgery and patient recovery, Sixense was able to generate enough capital to be able to offer full refunds to its 2,383 backers.

Sixense will pay the backers using a PayPal refund process, and are urged to respond to inquiries about their refunds by November 15.