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Facebook has cut the price of the Oculus Rift for the second time this year. It debuted at $800, was cut to $600 in March, and is now $400. Is there real trouble in the virtual reality market, or is it just a normal price correction now that early adopters have been served?
It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.
Even so, it's not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony's offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.
Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn't a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available. Don't believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.
Here's a February story about the Oculus demo stations at Best Buy stores being shut down.
Previously: Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:15PM (1 child)
We are still in VR v1.0 (I'm making up buzzwords here). The current Vive/Rift/etc are all development tools and early adopter toys. Applications are sparse, hardware is bulky, tethered and requires a serious gaming rig which most people don't want to invest in.
A few friends demoed the Vive and they were all impressed. One friend fell in love with the Vive so much he almost bought one for $800 until he realized he would need about $1500 in PC upgrades. That wasn't in his budget so he decided to wait until the next gen hardware comes out. And that is precisely what everyone is doing, waiting for VR 2.0.
VR 2.0 Will hopefully bring about wireless headsets, room scale integrated into the headset, and cross platform compatibility between headset platforms. We will also see self contained headsets with no need for a PC or console. The APU/GPU/CPU/Whatever will be in the headset. This is what Microsoft did with their Hololens and the next generation of Vive.
After that we will have a more mature VR ecosystem and the games will come. From my testing and use, I see plenty of great opportunity. The Valve Lab demo included a game called Long Bow. From that I can see a possible next generation of RPG/TBS where you are right there in the battle using your own hand-eye coordination and skills to attack mobs and dodge attacks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @09:57PM
The cost is too high currently. Even if it is niche tethered or not.
600 for the goggles. Then on top of that you need at least 1500+ bucks worth of computer with a decently high end GPU. Then the games are either 'amazeballs' or 'meh' or 'techdemo'.
I personally would love to get a set. I however get VR sickness really easily. So I am not going to get it.
It is the cost. Plus lack of interest from others. The size of the group of people willing to buy it has to be fairly smallish.