Yesterday, the big announcement for the Oculus Rift pricing went live, causing the entire internet to freak out when they say the hefty $599 price tag. Regardless of how you feel about the $599 headset, pre-orders are already getting filled. Palmer Luckey, Co-Founder of Oculus, wasn’t oblivious to the backlash from the internet, however. He took to his Reddit AMA to write a sincere apology. Here is what he said:
I handled the messaging poorly. 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. Many outlets picked the story up as “Rift will cost $1500!”, which was honestly a good thing – the vast majority of consumers (and even gamers!) don’t have a PC anywhere close to the rec. spec, and many people were confused enough to think the Rift was a standalone device. For that vast majority of people, $1500 is the all-in cost of owning Rift. The biggest portion of their cost is the PC, not the Rift itself.
For gamers that already have high end GPUs, the equation is obviously different. In a September interview, during the Oculus Connect developer conference, I made the infamous “roughly in that $350 ballpark, but it will cost more than that” quote. As an explanation, not an excuse: during that time, many outlets were repeating the “Rift is $1500!” line, and I was frustrated by how many people thought that was the price of the headset itself. My answer was ill-prepared, and mentally, I was contrasting $349 with $1500, not our internal estimate that hovered close to $599 – that is why I said it was in roughly the same ballpark. Later on, I tried to get across that the Rift would cost more than many expected, in the past two weeks particularly. There are a lot of reasons we did not do a better job of prepping people who already have high end GPUs, legal, financial, competitive, and otherwise, but to be perfectly honest, our biggest failing was assuming we had been clear enough about setting expectations. 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.
Luckey insists that for a high end VR device like the Oculus Rift, it is obscenely cheap. As this may be true, $599 dollars isn't just laying around to spend on a device that may or may not be worth it. How do you guys feel about the whole Oculus Rift pricing? Did you get pre-order one? Let us know in the comments below!
The Oculus Rift headset includes two games and an Xbox One controller, you can pre-order yours here.
