While we don’t know how big the stock available of the Rift is, you don’t start pre-orders until you can fulfil expected demand quickly.
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Regardless of the fact that the Oculus Rift pre-orders sold out in just 14 minutes, a number of people have pointed out that the VR headset’s price tag is much higher than what Oculus founder Palmer Lucky said it would be.
To check if your PC is compatible with the Rift headset, Oculus VR launched an application that verifies the user’s system and explains what incompatibilities need to be upgraded. As an explanation, not an excuse: during that time, many outlets were repeating the “Rift is $1500!” line, and I was frustrated by how many people thought that was the price of the headset itself. Lowering the price of the rift by reducing the quality could’ve been done – $500 or $400 – but it would’ve reduced the all-in investment for the average person from $1,500 to $1,300 maybe.
And the experience of using the Rift is very good.
The Oculus Touch controller has been delayed until the second half of 2016. This would seem to indicate an announcement has to come fairly soon, but at this point, the ball is in Sony’s court and all we can do is wait.
The Oculus Rift will cost £499 in the United Kingdom, €699 in other parts of Europe, CDN$849 in Canada, AUS$649 in Australia, NZ$699 in New Zealand, ¥83800 in Japan and KOR$649 in South Korea.
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He also emphasized that the Oculus Rift is still “obscenely cheap” for what it is – a device that creates high-end virtual reality, unlike anything people have seen before. While he thinks “it’s still a good headset”, he pointed to the hardware powering the headset as a limiting factor, noting that “PlayStation 4 is not almost as powerful as our recommended spec for a PC”. So while I don’t think the PlayStation VR will really cost $800, a price in the $600 range isn’t out of the question. They also understand the importance of content, and they’ve been doing a lot of work making sure there’s a lot of VR games.
