Oculus’ other rift, or why virtual reality is a concept car for no one

Like everyone else who has ever written about games, I once worked a season at my local games retailer and I also pride myself upon my ability to contort product titles into increasingly obnoxious puns. So it is with no small amount of shame that I admit I’ve only recently realized how apt and prophetic a name the Oculus Rift has been given, but let it be known that I’ve since pounced on it like a hyena on carrion. Because despite all Facebook’s prodding, that’s what it really boils down to: a rift, a seemingly unbridgeable space between consumers and the VR dreams of tomorrow. You may know this rift by its colloquial name: price.

After months, indeed years of whispers toeing the line between vaporware and the next big thing, we finally know something definitive about VR: it’s too damn expensive. With shockingly early pre-orders already raising their gates, the Oculus Rift has been officially priced at $599, putting its ostensible worth well above the range of add-on most people predicted and into the range of your first born child. Or at least a TV.

This particularly sour pill lingers on the tongue all the longer due to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s confirmation that a cheaper version of the Rift is “very unlikely.” For the sake of quality and consistency, only one version will be available for the foreseeable future. For now, the best Oculus can do in the way of a discount is advise buyers to pawn the Xbox One controller included with the headset—an amusingly stinging backhand for Microsoft, perhaps, but not the messiah wallets are praying for.

If you haven’t gagged already, get some mouthwash because we haven’t even gotten to the worst part: $600 is apparently an “obscenely cheap” price point, as Luckey put it, for the Rift. With this price, Luckey added, Oculus will not make any money on Rift hardware. It seems the company is running the PS3 gauntlet with their poster child product, accepting a per-unit deficit for the sake of expediting a healthy install base which will hopefully recoup costs. Daring, yes, and no-doubt necessary (god knows how high the price needs to be to show direct profit), but ultimately this just cements the hopelessness of the situation: consumer and producer alike are pulling their hair out over the Rift’s daunting price tag.

It sounds bad, which it is, but this new price has only poured new kerosene on the smoldering fire which has been slowly charring VR since its inception. There’s a familiar equation of doom hovering ominously over virtual reality, and it all starts with enough. I’ll pick on Oculus here, but the same goes for Sony’s PlayStation VR, HTC’s Vive and everything else that involves strapping a screen to your face.

If it wants the Rift to be sustainable, Oculus will have to find a price point and production process cheap enough to attract enough early buyers to satisfy enough creators to produce enough software to maintain the active market they are clearly depending on to bring in enough revenue to keep the company afloat. Add to this a mix of perilous system requirements, ambiguous development prospects and the whole face-strapping thing and you wind up with a business venture only two types of people would accept: the stark raving mad and the stark raving determined. I’m willing to put Luckey and Oculus in the latter camp, but only because they wear t-shirts to all their press conferences.

The catch-22 of VR is that it is only popular because it’s around today, yet it cannot work today. Its laudable innovation is also its guillotine, because innovation doesn’t come cheap. The Rift is the concept car claiming it can travel a thousand miles on farts alone. It’s the solar-powered house that could save you thousands each year and ideally free up some of the ozone layer. It is a brilliant idea representing what could very well be the next step for an industry, but as we’ve already established, it’s too damn expensive.

Whether its $300 thousand for a car, $30 thousand for some solar panels on your house, or $600 for a world class forehead counterbalance, price—or more accurately, production costs—always gets in the way of innovation. It doesn't matter if we can make it; what matters is if we can offer it to the everyman. Luckey said it himself: “We cannot significantly reduce the cost without dramatically reducing quality.”

Oculus has no good way out. To drop the price they’d have to undercut the quality, thereby butchering their vision and the usefulness of the product. To form a safer business model they’d have to raise the price so high that nobody would consider it, and beyond that recruit surgeons to collect all the kidneys people would have to part with to even get on the layaway list. Because neither are particularly appealing, we’re left to ponder this “obscenely cheap” Rift.

We still haven’t gotten to the elephant of intimidating newness that refuses to leave the room. The fact of the matter is, consumers have no real way of knowing that VR is even worth the money because they have no precedent, as they would when buying, say, a $400 console. Sensational “I’ve been converted” stories born of 30-minute demos count for exactly nothing considering next to nobody has played a proper VR game from start to finish, especially when just as many people seem to be making the things. Those lists of in-progress VR projects sound great on paper, but always seem to disappear when it’s time for a presentation, don’t they?

I realize I’ve probably come across as a smidgen cynical about all this, so I’ll say now that I put plenty of stock in VR as a concept. We can’t forget that we’re talking about the promise of an incomparably encapsulating and responsive digital landscape that could elevate gaming, among other media, to a heretofore unthinkable level of immersion. If someone can pull it off it will be the next big thing, and for gaming more than any other industry, in no small part because the games industry’s current definition of innovation seems to be killing itself with needlessly lavish graphics and struggling to wring more money out of fetid pools of viscera that were at some point dead horses.

Unfortunately, $600 headsets are not going to cut it. We can at least take solace in the fact that every great invention in history started as a concept, and they all somehow stumbled their way to fruition despite the pessimism of assholes like me. And you know the old saying: today’s pipe dreams are tomorrow’s fart-powered cars. Who’s to say VR isn’t next? Well, me, for starters, but that’s only for today. Tomorrow, I have faith in.