Oculus Rift to cost “at least $300”

Oculus Rift to cost “at least $300”

 

At the Oculus Connect developer’s conference the companies VP Nate Mitchell has announced that the Oculus  Rift to cost “at least $300” which will include the headset and the Xbox One Controller. 

On the topic of pre-orders he stated that the company did not want to take the money of customers too early, likening their pre-order plans to that of Apple saying that they want to announce the product, open it for Pre-order the next week and shipping the product the following week. Nate said that this kind of Pre-order experience was “ideal” for the consumer. 

 

 “there isn’t a big reason to take your money too far ahead of the device.” He continued: “What I think about all day long is user experience, right? So if I’m going to promise you something and you’re going to hand me a significant amount of money or whatever it is—we all know it’s going to be at least $300—if you’re going to hand me $300 today, I am not going to be excited to tell you: ‘OK, in nine, 10, 12, 11 months, whatever it is, you’re going to get something in return.’ The longer you wait, the more you’re like, ‘This is obnoxious.’ “

  

 

Oculus still plans to release the consumer version of the Oculus Rift in Q1 2016, but plans on releasing the Rift’s Oculus Touch motion controller later that year in Q2. 

The company has said that they decided to sell the product separately at a later date so that the company could better focus on the release of each product. 

 

  

The coming months are going to be very interesting for consumer VR as each VR headset comes ever closer to release. The two biggest headset that are coming to consumers in 2016 will be the Oculus Rift and the HTC/Valve Vive. 

One of the biggest hopes for consumer VR is that each headset does not overly fragment the VR market, as the idea of having to own two VR headsets in order to play all VR games is simply too much for most consumers to handle. 

Hopefully HTC’s Vive and the Oculus Rift will be very competitively priced and will both offer consumers with a great VR experience, otherwise VR may have a very difficult time getting wide adoption. 

 

You can join the discussion on the Oculus Rift’s Price on the OC3D Forums.