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.