Oculus Rift consumer version preorders open now! $599, shipping March 2016

$599 USD – yikes! (won’t charge until shipment)

https://shop.oculus.com/

Anyone as crazy as me preordering?

No, and I think market will be quite much smaller for Rift than initially thought.

So maybe Epic can make an epic leap and optimize UE4 for Gear VR now?

No, I won’t - although (or maybe because) I already own a DK2. But that price is a bit too steep for my taste, and what’s worse, I guess it’s too steep for most “consumers”, making it less interesting as a target audience.

I preordered, certainly. The price was a bit more than I was hoping for, but it’s not really unexpected. You’re getting a lot of high-end tech packed into a relatively small device - of course it was gonna be expensive.

Basically everyone on reddit and the other various forums I’ve checked out has complained about the price, and they’re all assuming it’ll make a significant dent in adoption rates. I’m not sure that’s the case, though - it seems like their initial stock of HMDs sold out in just 14 minutes today, with expected shipments starting March 28th, and all other orders are being pushed back further into the year. I think if you preorder right this second it’s already pushed into shipping in May. Preorder tomorrow and it’s probably June or July, maybe later.

The demand is there, but like any impressive high end tech, VR will become something everyone wants before it’s something everyone can afford.

I believe the arrival date is dependent on when you ordered. It originally said March for me, but I was having troubles ordering, and by the time I finally ordered (20 minutes later), it said I am set to get mine in May 2016, according to the order page.

Yeah, it was the same for me. Originally for March, ended up with April (luckily). I also got charged four $1 deposits because I kept clicking the stupid refresh button.

Yeah, maybe we, developers can afford to but the CV1 but we dont make games/movies for us but for the consumers. If they dont buy it, then who would buy our applications? It make me to think one more time about developing for VR. There is so much negative response now that we didnt expect to be. Developing a game for the market isnt cheap and if consumers complains a lot than this is not a good sign. We need to take into account that they need a strong PC, stronger that for DK2 because of 90 FPS. For us it is 750 euro 1 oculus + 1.000 - 1.500 euro for a PC. Consumers dont care what is under the hood of Oculus and what are the cost. If I go buy a TV I don`t care about how many people worked on this tech. This is not a good day for VR devs but I still hope that their will sell a lot of them so we can work on VR and develop some games/movies for it.

And in Europe they are even more willing to milk the customer… :rolleyes:

699 Euro plus shipping… makes 741 in total… :eek:

I guess I wait until the 1.1 revision fixed the small issues that will show up (somethings always commin up)…
And then it will be time to upgrade the hardware anyway…

When they are talking about “exclusive titles”, they might as well talk about “exclusive customers” :wink:

Thankfully i was a kickstarter backer (actually ordered 2, i’m guessing i’ll only get 1 CV1)

My VR collection:
-Homemade VR headset (based off of palmers early prototypes)
-DK1
-DK2
-Gear VR (for note 5)
-Soon: CV1.

I have a problem :X

I’ll cross my teeth and repost a post I made somewhere else here:
It is bad communication at their end, as they knew that the ballpark price range was going to be around this point for quite a while, I will say that. But considering all the stuff bundled and the fact that it is indeed being sold at max revenue of “at cost” it is not that bad. You spend upwards of 1000USD/EUR for your tv alone (or similar price of a rift for a high refresh rate monitor) and the Rift is so much more and can potentially do so much more. But yeah it will sadly be for enthusiasts for the very near future. it seems Oculus is banking a lot on good reviews and word of mouth to get their sales up, as the preorders do not lock you in to buying a unit.

I would be very surprised if PSVR will be hacked to work with PC AND give out anywhere near decent experience let alone a good one. I have a pair of PS Move controllers on my desk and still have not been successful at pairing them with my PC even though they have been around for ages. But yeah chances are your buy in price will be ~500USD/EUR cheaper when investing in PS ecosystem from zero.

No I am not thrilled, but I am not devastated either at this point. I am a dev though and for me it is a good sign that they have already sold out the March and April preorders, though some of them might be fraudulent trying to buy them in bulk and resell them.

Agree with you 100%

I think everyone got 4 $1 withdrawals, I know I did.

Agree, and touch controller later in the year, that mean about perhaps 180€/200 +50 shipping for europe.

I reserved but i think i will cancel it, for developing for fun its enough the dk2, and for developing for money we need a lot of consumers than only the most wealthy/freak.

Perhaps in 1’5 or 2 years with Cv2 and eye tracking and more affordable overall.

That not going to be the year of the VR.

I’m out… partially

and very disappointed as they promised something for the masses, something relatively cheap.

But for this price you have a fully, standalone product and Oculus is just an addon. You must buy a very strong PC and some applications. With TV you dont have to spent extra money. Even though, the price would be ok if there were really cool stuff but there is almost nothing. Devs are working for 2 years on their projects and they/we have spent a lot of money on it. Our future is dependent of the VR buyers. We cant sell our products if there will be no one using it. I bet that almost half of the buyers today were devs. We need the VR to be bought by ordinary Joe and not rich people or big companies. Maybe you will use it for fun but most of us are using it to generate money and we need to think about the future of our companies. I dont care what Palmer sais about the high price. By the end only the price for the product matters. Who cares about some PR talk if it still doesnt change the price? I need to make calculation based on the people response etc and today I saw few thousands negative post all over the net and this is not a good sign.

Just give it time, VR will gradually lower in price, and will get better over time.

Yeah I guess we hoped that the Facebook deal would allow them to sell pretty low to achieve market penetration. Sadly the thing needs a powerful PC so mass adoption was probably not happening anyway. Oculus realized this and now targets the enthusiasts market that especially Facebook doesn’t really care much about but they can sell at prices that the average joe isn’t going to pay. according to a tweet by Palmer, they are not making money with it. They are probably selling it at about cost. New technology is expensive.

The whole situation is a bit unfortunate. Since they wanted to beat the competition, they had to release just about now. They were always worried that a competitor would come out before they could, possibly with an inadequate cheap device that would seriously hurt the market before the whole VR craze could even start. The result of that is a device that needs just a bit too high specs to drive and costs just a bit too much. The decision to go 90 Hz for this first device was not smart to be honest. 75 would have been enough for now, would have required a little lower specs and possibly cheaper manufacturing cost since we already had that in a $350 DK2.

So with enthusiasts being the target for now, my biggest gripe is the useless items in the package. A gamepad, headphone, remote, which enthusiast doesn’t already have this stuff or doesn’t need it? It would have made sense at $400 but like this you have to wonder how much this **** inflated the price. Motion controllers is what they should have included, if anything. I cringe at the thought that the gamepad is hereby endorsed by Oculus to be a perfectly fine VR controller.

I’m really excited for the product but until Oculus touch is released I’ve decided it would be best to just focus on the GearVR.

I’m no financial expert but the vibe I’m getting right now from CV is telling me that this is going to be focused more-so on those with some disposable income (or those who already own previous devkits), and now that we have official “simulated upper body support” anything running on a xbox controller is basically going to be viewed as just a 3d game and not an immersive experience no matter how much hard work was put into it unless the stars align and shine brightly on your creation. Long story short if you already have something you should be safe but you gotta release it before Touch comes out. Me on the other hand I’ve been focusing on mobile and I’ll be damned if I try to sell a guy a mobile game to play on his brand new high quality $600-750 desktop VR headset.

No, I won’t. Sleep in peace VR hype. I’m still sure VR would make it sooner or later but with this price (even if it’s already subsidized) doesn’t look like a hype that is meant for the common folk right now. No revolution but a slow progress. This is ok. More money to do something else with right now. :slight_smile: - At first I’ve put away some money because I thought I would buy and develop for it when the final version is out. But this price isn’t only higher than I would pay currently (including a new PC - excluding the still not available controllers) - it’s even higher then most would pay right now. There are still millions of people with laptops that are far away from the required performance (but would still play good games) and even most PCs that run any game with very high details would be too weak. So in my opinion this is a much too high step for the gaming mainstream of today. Graphic or a virtual reality is just one part of a good game. I’m sure there would be some that invest that 2000€ for VR and PC upgrade but I’m pretty sure that most of gamers would not follow this for about 4-5 years (and even then there would be a mixed amount of number). This makes it pretty uninteresting for me to invest money and time into it right now. If the HTC Vive would not be much cheaper (and I’m in doubt that this would be the case) then VR on the PC would not be the revolution that soon as it was expected at first.

I fully agree that the price of CV1 will affect the size of the market as far as the number of potential consumers… but it’s possible that there’s more potential money than it may initially seem to be spent on VR games/apps, as indicated by overwhelming preorder demand, and another less obvious factor:

Many preorders are from developers of course, but there is a large contingent of early adopter enthusiasts out there who just want to play VR games, who just want to finally experience the promise of VR. I’ve met and talked to plenty of people who have no inclination to develop, but have bought DK1, DK2, and/or the first Gear VR, all of which were expressly intended for use by developers to both “shakedown” the prerelease hardware and SDK and get a head start on developing commercial projects before reliable, consumer-friendly hardware hit the market.

And by and large these non-dev enthusiasts loved the experience – and just as importantly, they were happy to pay the steep price for “just a headset”.

Another factor to consider is that we just don’t know how pricing will work for VR games: will a mainstream AAA VR title retail for $60? Despite the race to the bottom of game pricing brought on by mobile, free-to-play, and Steam sales (among other factors), is there any reason to believe that the going rate for a premium VR game won’t be higher than current standards? We already see limited/collector’s/etc editions of what are otherwise $60 games selling for $80, $120, or sometimes much more. I for one would be happy to pay more than the asking price for many games I’ve loved, and to compensate have tended to buy them on multiple platforms, gift to friends, etc to reward developers whose work I appreciate.

It’s possible that the group of consumers with multiple game consoles, and/or high-end gaming PCs, and/or Steam game libraries numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, and who can afford to pay $600 for an enthusiast accessory like a Rift, might also be willing to pay a premium for the games/apps that make their hardware investment worthwhile. This isn’t mainstream, but there are plenty of us devs who are either solo or small teams/studios who don’t need to sell 50k, 100k, 500k copies of their game to stay in business and keep doing what they love.

Disruptive tech like this can’t help but splinter the market to some degree, but I know I’m not alone in being very happy to not keep buying into the stream of safe, predictable AAA FPS games at $60/each and rather spend my money on something new, something moving, something we could never do before.

This is akin to early days of smartphones, a premium device that was once out of reach to most, that seemed superfluous, ostentatious, even silly. But now there are over a billion smartphone users worldwide, a number which will only continue to grow. Much of this growth is simply due to providers finding clever ways to make $200-600+ smartphones affordable to buy every two years, while customers barely feel it in their wallet.

[Can something similar be done with VR? You pay for your monthly Xbox Live membership, your monthly Playstation Plus membership… your monthly Oculus VentuR membership? Flat rate to get free access to a small selection of otherwise premium VR games; and a new, cheap or free VR headset every 2 years on contract subsidized by your monthly payments…]

In any case, as VR (and to perhaps an even greater degree Augmented Reality) hardware and software continues to penetrate the market, come down in price, and become more portable, it will become similarly ubiquitous. Now is still a little too soon to expect to cash in tremendously on VR sales… but it will happen.

We are the devs! It’s up to us whether this happens, or VR withers on the vine…

Hell of a gamble to develop for a platform hoping people will pay more for a game, enough to make up for say 95% less sales. Doubt that’s going to work. As always multi-platform is going to be the reasonable thing I guess, making the game at least play acceptably in VR.