I don't think they even have a few hundred thousand customers. Their first one kicked in the neighborhood of 50k supporters. Did they even ship the second?
A hardware company on the hook for fulfilling 50k orders of the sequel has some pretty serious expenses. A sale might have been the best landing and what got everyone a refund for the 2nd.
Their pebble app has 500,000+ downloads on the Google store, and they have 2 million in pebble sales (I believe that's delivered). They've shipped their second Kickstarter last year (Pebble Time Steal).
Ah. I guess they probably sold plenty of units through other channels.
Still, they might need an incredibly high number of people to pay. And then people would bitch and say that they're running a ponzi scheme like a bitcoin wallet that lost all of its deposits. My guess is they've engineered a soft landing for orders they can't fulfill and employees and it's the best option in a bad situation. I'd commend them for doing that rather than taking the easy route.
Pebble Time 2 would have been their third major product. They had the original Pebble, and then the Pebble Time. IIRC the Pebble Steel and Pebble Time Round were sort of secondary projects, but if you include them then they had 4 generations of delivered products.
A hardware company on the hook for fulfilling 50k orders of the sequel has some pretty serious expenses. A sale might have been the best landing and what got everyone a refund for the 2nd.