Less than you may have thought… but more than you may have hoped.
It’s undeniable that the Oculus Rift represents a next step in gaming. Despite the fact we have many other VR products on the horizon, the Oculus Rift has very much been the poster child for the possibilities of the medium. Of course, we’re all itching to get one in the reported launch window of 2016, but the biggest question we all have is how much will it actually cost?
After all, nobody’s expecting this ground breaking technology to be cheap. However, projections from the company centered the pricing on $350 at launch. So… we were all left wondering if that was really going to be the case.
And, according to Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey, those original expectations were pretty correct.
What did Palmer Luckey say?
In an interview with Road to VR, Mr Luckey was asked if the Oculus Rift would meet the $350 price point originally projected. Luckey seemed to believe that wasn’t realistic:
“You know, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We’re roughly in that ballpark… but it’s going to cost more than that. And the reason for that is that we’ve added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days.
And it’s not a matter of ‘oh we’re selling more, we can make more money!’ it’s just the reality that when you make this thing you have to decide what tradeoffs you’re going to make; are you going to optimize for absolute lowest price possible, even if it’s gonna be a lower quality experience? Or do you try to say ‘you know what, this is the first consumer VR headset that were going to be pushing out to people. We need to put a stake in the ground and say: this is the best possible experience that we were able to make. No compromises were made in terms of quality’. Get the cost down as much as you can on that experience, but make it so that the Rift is something that everybody wants to use to the best of your ability.”
Did he give an exact number?
No.
How much do you think it’ll cost?
Well, he did say “We’re roughly in that ballpark,” which leads us to believe it won’t cost too much more than $350. We doubt it’ll cost more than $450 based on his statement.
What does that mean for the Oculus Rift?
It means that you’re essentially buying another console. After all, the Playstation 4 was $399.99 when it launched in 2013.
That’s a lot of money.
It is. You’ll have to decide if the purchase is right for you when the time comes. Obviously, the price will lower in time… so you’ll have to decide how long you’ll want to wait. We know one thing for certain, there are a ton of games we can’t wait to play on it.
