Oculus announced the price of the Rift headset yesterday. The price of the virtual reality headset is a hefty £500/ $600.
After the announcement, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey went to Reddit to take questions from people. Unsurprisingly, most of the questions were about the Rift's price tag.
Luckey said "To be perfectly clear, we don't make money on the Rift". According to Luckey the bundled controller and games aren't the main reason, as to why the price is so high. "The Xbox controller costs us almost nothing to bundle, and people can easily resell it for profit."
"A lot of people wish we would sell a bundle without 'useless extras' like high-end audio, a carrying case, the bundled games, etc, but those just don't significantly impact the cost."
According to Luckey, it's the components in the Rift headset which explains the pricing: "The core technology in the Rift is the main driver - two built-for-VR OLED displays with very high refresh rate and pixel density, a very precise tracking system, mechanical adjustment systems that must be lightweight, durable, and precise, and cutting-edge optics that are more complex to manufacture than many high end DSLR lenses."
"It is expensive, but for the $599 you spend, you get a lot more than spending $599 on pretty much any other consumer electronics devices - phones that cost $599 cost a fraction of that to make, same with mid-range TVs that cost $599. There are a lot of mainstream devices in that price-range, so as you have said, our failing was in communication, not just price."
On Reddit, Luckey apologised for this "poor messaging".
"I handled the messaging poorly," he admitted. "Earlier last year, we started officially messaging that the Rift+Recommended spec PC would cost roughly $1500. That was around the time we committed to the path of prioritizing quality over cost, trying to make the best VR headset possible with current technology."
"Another problem is that people looked at the much less advanced technology in DK2 for $350 and assumed the consumer Rift would cost a similar amount, an assumption that myself (and Oculus) did not do a good job of fixing. I apologize."
At least Luckey acknowledged that he handled the messaging of the Rift badly and apologised. The Oculus Rift will release in March/ April. All things considered this makes the offer of giving away a free unit of the consumer version to everyone who bought an Oculus Rift DK1 via the Kickstarter even more generous. Remains to be seen how HTC will price the Vive and what Sony have in mind for PlayStation VR.