Facebook Inc.’s Oculus VR is dropping the price of its Rift virtual-reality headset by $100, in a bid to spur sales after a rocky first year for the device. At launch, the Oculus Rift headset system alone cost $599, with the Touch controllers coming in at $199.
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Those costs don’t include a high-powered computer that needs to be connected to the Rift. A room-scale VR setup with Oculus and its Touch controllers will now cost about $680, while the Vive costs $800. This undercuts its primary competition, the HTC Vive’s $799 price tag, by a wide margin and is only $100 more expensive than the other comparable VR system-PlayStation VR.
Oculus has yet to release any sales numbers for the Rift VR headset, but analysts put the product in third place behind HTC’s Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR.
Rubin acknowledges that “price matters”, and that progress in lowering the bar of entry for PC VR hardware has been made in the past year. To get that on the Rift requires an additional sensor, which costs $99 more. Today we’re taking a material leap forward thanks to two things: price and timing.
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“Oculus’ mission is to drive VR to the mass market”, says Jason Rubin, Oculus’ VP of content. Without motion controls it feels more like a fancy display than true VR. It’s an action adventure game set in space, which is also meant for Oculus Rift as well as touch. But today’s massive $200 price drop on the hardware bundle will go a long way towards making the Rift an appealing purchase for a more mainstream audience. And those with a solid foundation of knowledge in VR now will be key to determining the direction in which this moves in the future. This new pricing is already reflected on Oculus’ own site and online retailers like Amazon. Google also recently released the Google Daydream VR headset ($80), which now only works with Google’s Pixel smartphone ($649).
