I'm sorry, but $600 is a retarded amount for the Oculus VR headset and way beyond what I was thinking it was going to land at. I get that this is a new piece of technology, but pricing it at twice the cost of a development kit, and in addition, not including the controllers, seems excessive. VR is great and my time using the Oculus has always been profound, I'm very much pro-VR, but that pricetag is killer. It's killer for many reasons:
- This is totally early adopter technology.
- This VR headset will be considered incompatable with future games if VR takes off, as improvements will vastly derank it (look at the T-Mobile G1 vs. the first Google Nexus).
- Palmer Luckey said "in the ballpark of $350" then hit a home run with launch pricing of "$599"
- No matter how boss or hype the technology is, game companies will not continue to develope for technology that isn't adopted.
The good news is that other people are entering the arena, with HTC Vive being a possible low cost alternative (don't count on it, it's being billed a premium device) and Razer working on OS-VR to open up the field to a large group of hardware developers working on the same software platform. Anyway, $599 is a lot, and it's not really at the price point I want to adopt it at, considering we don't have the following:
- Reviews of the absolute final consumer unit.
- Comparison of the true increase in power of the DK2 and consumer unit.
- A wealth of software to utilize it.
- You need a strong gaming PC to use it.
Now Facebook has big pockets and they're obviously working hard on getting game studios to develop for the Oculus, but something I have to ask is, and this is rather important, at this price point wouldn't it be smarter to offer a less premium edition, something even similar in specs to the DK2, so that people could explore the technology? In the Reddit AMA, Palmer Luckey brought up how Gear VR's primary use case is video content. If the same holds true on PC, then will you really need those PC gaming specs?
I'm not sure, but I'm rather of the opinion that I'd rather see a cheaper unit available, around $300, than something at or near the price of a Samsung Galaxy Edge, which would work with the Gear VR and be a real phone, versus a unit which is limited to just the PC and isn't a phone. There is a plethora of things to talk about in regards to this idea that there is ways to get VR, right now, for way less than $600 and enjoy how novel it is, versus what is for some a near full month of pay or more.
Bringing this back around, it's just notable to mention this because a lot of excitement for VR has now slowed down for some folks, who were expecting the unit to be priced near the development kit. Will this or will this not bring about the VR revolution? Will some other company come in with an ecno-unit and clean house? Time will tell, but for me, the price isn't right... yet.
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