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Oculus Rift available for preorder for $599.99, shipping in March

I dunno guys, when i think of the kinds of A/V and tech shit I have bought over the years....$1500 TVs, expensive-ass Macs in my home office, phones for $500+, AV Receivers (shit, mine was $700 by itself and all it does is make the $1000 speakers I have work) and all the shit that goes with a media center nowadays.

I don't make a ton of money, I just key in on a thing I want and throw $50-$100 into a pile here and there and before i know it i have the cash.

I guess what i am seeing is that in the landscape of "hot new tech items" a $700 VR kit seems just about right.

Xboxs and PS4s compete with toys. They always have, so they have to be under this imaginary cost line that other "tech" doesn't have to.
 
low-G said:
FWIW I'm genuinely hurt as an adult that can afford an Oculus because I know the product can no longer be a success nor can I rationally throw $600 on this particular revision of the product.

VR future has shattered.
Click to expand...

Considering the release date is getting pushed back as more people order, it's selling as much as they're making. They had realistic expectations.

jmdajr said:
Hmmm. Are they motherboard ports? or a expension card?

I have a card and it runs kind of crap.
Click to expand...

Motherboard ports. It suggests using an expansion card, but combined with the price(which I kinda expected) I think I'll wait until its out in the wild for a bit before biting the bullet.
 
DoctorWho said:
Because prices never came down on HDTVs, 4kHDTVs, Blu-Ray players, DVD players.

They always stayed at the same price.
Click to expand...
I don't think this is a big problem for VR, but it may be a problem for Oculus specifically.

If Sony really manages to get a price around 450€, they're gonna scoop up a lot of disappointed people right now (me included).
 
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I haven't been following Rift development, but I assume that there are plenty of existing games than can be retro-enabled to work with it, right? I keep seeing people say "3 software titles only" etc. Who is right?
 
eot said:
Compare this to smartphone prices, then consider that this thing has two screens and it doesn't seem as unreasonable.
Click to expand...

I know when I buy a new smartphone that there will be plenty uses for it. We don't know what will be available for this.
 
gamechanger87 said:
The market for consoles is significantly larger than VR headsets. Also, the PS4 was launch ed at a small profit not a loss. MS screwed themselves with the pack-in of the Kinect pricing-wise.

I expect that Sony has already run the numbers and expects to sell X amount at $500 and Y amount at $400. Does the difference between X and Y make up for the revenue shortfall? If you price at $400 and you lose money on every sale you are in trouble because the licensing fees will not be large enough to make up for the loss however small it may be. The number of units sold will be too small to make up for it. A lot of people that will buy at $400 will also buy at $500 because that's what early adopters do.

This isn't like a console where you expect to sell 80 million and make licensing fees on game sales. The market is exponentially smaller. You price the base product at a level where you aren't already in the hole.
Click to expand...


Sony launch PS4 taking a small lost ,.
Also for Sony this is just like a console since they will be making money off licensing fees.
It's one of the advantages they have so they can play around more with price .
 
I wish they'd offer a cheaper version without an Xbox One controller. I already own two standard Xbox One controllers, one elite Xbox One controller, three PS4 controllers, and one Steam Controller. I don't need any more controllers.
 
Would need to upgrade my video card and maybe my processor—my i5 2500K, even overclocked, is showing its age a bit—and that's just not worth it right now. About $1,000 to enjoy VR? Guess I'll have to wait for the average joe models and not the enthusiast ones.
 
It's got game support. Plenty of regular games will have a VR mode. Thats how devs will make money. And it's not just a gaming device, guys, it does way more than that. 360 video is also a thing.
 
Curious to think that PSVR could have a relatively cheap barebones package with headset and external box, no camera for the many people that have one already, no Moves as many people have them already and the DS4 is also VR ready.

If the tech is so inferior to the Rift (it isnt that far behind, offers compelling VR to all who have tried it) it could really come in well under the Rift cost. Rift has better screens, Rift has the camera as an essential, it also comes with a roughly $50 controller that's sort of useless to many... Why couldn't PSVR be under $400?

Sony also have better manufacturing resources at their disposal, they also have far more certainty in making money from software as it is their own closed system. Oculus will sell some headsets and never make a penny from those users again, not so with PSVR.

The ball is in Sony's court.
 
DoctorWho said:
Because prices never came down on HDTVs, 4kHDTVs, Blu-Ray players, DVD players.

They always stayed at the same price.
Click to expand...

Of course the price will come down, if the market sustains until that point. All of the things you listed were niche when they first released, but the benefits of them all were easily understood, so the market accepted them, allowing the price to drop. VR cannot be directly compared. They needed to come out with a low entry price for market penetration, and they out priced themselves for that.
 
Seems like they're at least factoring in production to these preorder shipment deliveries. I'm sure some pill counter at Sony is running the numbers to get the demand curve up so they can price their correctly based on this preorder.
 
Impulsor said:
If I check the order number I can''t see a date.
Click to expand...

This is weird...whenever I click the order number on the final page, it takes me to another final page with the same order number, but the first was March as the date. Then April. I clicked the order number in the link for the April number, and it said May. This is weird.
 
DoctorWho said:
Because prices never came down on HDTVs, 4kHDTVs, Blu-Ray players, DVD players.

They always stayed at the same price.
Click to expand...

Terrible analogy. Those things are every day things for the household. Its not something you have to wear on your face secluding yourself from everything else in the world while sitting in front of a computer.

You don't have to worry about those things because everyone watches TV and owns movies. Everyone talks on the phone so smart phones were a no brainer. Virtual Reality headsets for PC gaming...its such a small market to begin with and they just priced out 95% of their user base. Guessing on the 95% part, obviously. I know nobody that is going to pay $600 for an Oculus Rift. I'm sure a lot of people will, but will it be enough so that it actually gets support, or will it be phased out like the Kinect? Wait and see approach.
 
Ninja Scooter said:
Makes sense. The first gen of VR was never going to hit the mainstream. This is the get their feet in the door so to speak. People need to think of this the way a lot of new technology was priced. Brand new DVD and BluRay players were ridiculously expensive, and most people didn't buy in until 2-3 years into that techs lifespan. VR will be no different. Nobody, especially the manufacturers, were expecting this thing to be the new Wii or Kinect right out of the gate. People are looking at this wrong if that's what they were expecting. It's a much different business model with VR, much more of a slow burn. The VR set that your grandma tries during a family get together at Thanksgiving might not be out for another 5 years.
Click to expand...

But VR seems to still be in a nebulous place. No uniform control mechanism. Things like eye-tracking coming into the picture recently.

If I bought a BluRay player as they came out it pretty much does what a BluRay player will do down the line, just clunkier. With VR I get the impression that an Oculus Rift CV2 will have a killer new feature than invalidates the last, more like an iPhone than a BluRay player.
 
Bleeding edge 1.0 consumer tech meant initially for the most adventurous and those willing to spend a premium price to be first in line using some of the highest-end software and hardware available. Considering that, the launch price is in the expected ballpark to me. High initial cost was always going to be a major barrier to mainstream consumer acceptance if the relatively short cycles of early hardware iterations and lack of content and applications weren't. I'm not sure why anyone expecting very similarly capable hardware from anyone else is seriously confident that it will be significantly less costly any time soon. VR is super early and still evolving. We're many years away from a sustainable ecosystem that can make the any serious software aimed at it pay for itself, certainly. Still, exciting times ahead.
 
Lilalaunebaer said:
Why are there people yelling VR will fail because the Generation 1 devices are expensive?

It´s too expensive for me right now, but that´s how it is. I´d rather have them start off with tech that is good and therefore expensive rather than some piece of shit that is cheap and not work right and have bad impressions.

What would actually make VR fail is not a high price but a shitty product.

Also yeah, HD TVs will fail, 8000$? DVD will fail, 1000$?

Just wait a couple of years for the price to come down. The "main stream" market right now is absolutely irrelevant. The most important part right now is to have a good product.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Too many are looking at this as if its a video game console, when its more analogous to actual bleedign edge technologies like we saw with the first dvd, bluray, and hdtvs. They know full well they wont penetrate the mainstream market at $599 and thats ok because they arent trying to.
 
gundamkyoukai said:
Sony launch PS4 taking a small lost ,.
Also for Sony this is just like a console since they will be making money off licensing fees.
It's one of the advantages they have so they can play around more with price .
Click to expand...

You only build a product around licensing fees if you think the market is large enough that the number of games sold and their respective licensing fees make up for the difference.

This isn't a console model. The market is way too small. Don't even try and argue that there is a massive market here. Kinect sold ~25M at it was at a much lower price point than this. I don't see anyone expecting VR to sell 25M on the PS4.

I think if they sell 1-2M of them, they will be absolutely ecstatic.
 
That's what people pay for smartphones these days. Yeah, I'm tempted, but when I think about how many games I can buy for that kind of money, I'm not that interested anymore.
 
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