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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:57PM
I'm in complete agreement with regards to the rift - I have no intention of buying expensive hardware from facebook just so later they can make changes to integrate it with facebook itself or something similar. Rift died for me the day they sold themselves to Facebook.
With the PSVR, I'm actually a little more open about it, but it's a system that'll be more likely to die due to being tied to a console. Similarly this is going to mean it'll have far less games for it (only those sony approves)
That leaves the last competitor as a potential VR system for me, but unfortunately for VR companies - I'm not rich and it would take me long enough just to save up to buy the VR setup and I'd still not have a computer strong enough to run it well enough to justify the purchase. And even THEN I have to sit back and realize I don't have a lot of space to set up a VR system anyway.