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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: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:05PM
I'll add that when looking at benchmarks for VR, you'll definitely want to take note of the minimum FPS. Sometimes one GPU will have a higher average FPS than other, but dramatically lower minimum FPS due to bad optimization, drivers, or whatever. Percentiles can also be used [anandtech.com] to give a better idea of how demanding a title is throughout an entire benchmark sequence.
Minimum FPS is considered important for VR because a sudden drop in FPS below the acceptable amount (60-90) hurts immersion and maybe triggers NAUSEA.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]