Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Open and Company Founder Defends Pricing

So you'll no doubt have heard that the Oculus Rift is now available to pre-order. What you might not have heard is the rather wallet-unfriendly price of the unit. Coming in at $599 in the US and £499 in the UK, the device isn't particularly close to the planned $300 that Oculus Inc initially expected. This has understandably caused a bit of backlash from fans on the internet. 

To address concerns and questions, as well as to help publicise and celebrate the pre-order opening, founder of Oculus inc, Palmer Luckey took to Reddit for an "Ask me Anything" session. Amongst other things he discussed software support, announcing that there will be at least 100 games available by the end of 2016 and confirming windows 7 and 8 support as well as 10. 

The main focus of course, was on the price of the unit. With so much focus in advance of the unveiling on the cost being "in the ballpark of $350", a lot of people wanted to know what had happened to make the final unit so much more expensive than the early development units, and Luckey's own estimates. He responded with an apology for the confusion:

"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 went on to confirm that there is no profit made on the Rift and that most of the cost is made up of the unit itself and not the bundled extras such as games and the included Xbox One controller.  He also stated that it was unlikely for the first generation of the Rift that we would see any cut-down packages without these extras as it's important that they keep the system standardised in the interests of making a homogeneous platform for developers. You can read the full AMA here.