Oculus Cuts Price On Rift Goggles and Touch Controllers (usatoday.com) 36
Oculus said Wednesday it is cutting the price of its Rift headset and Touch motion controllers by $100 each, dropping the cost of a complete system to $598. From a report: The Rift and Touch combination will drop to $598 from $799, or roughly $100 off each piece of high-end hardware. The discount applies even if the devices are purchased separately. Earlier this week, Oculus announced it was expanding its gaming content selection by eight titles. Brendan Iribe, who heads up the Oculus PC/VR group, refutes the notion that the price slash is in response to slow sales. "VR is a whole new platform and medium, it's the first time people are putting a computer on their head," Iribe, 37, told USA TODAY at the Game Developers Conference here. "We are cutting the price to bring VR to more people, and that's always been our goal."
Oculus in trouble? (Score:1)
Seems like yet more evidence that Oculus must be in serious financial trouble, probably both from their Zenimax lawsuit and from Valve/Steam/Vive significantly outselling them.
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Running on VC money. Cash flow isn't the issue. They are grabbing market, or at least trying.
Hopefully they are over trying to own the market. Their API has been subsumed by SteamVRs. For devs, the choice is Oculus or Vive and Oculus. I don't see any reason any dev would choose Oculus only.
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Oculus is still overpriced by about 20% with its new $600 list price.
FTFY.
Rift offers better resolution, better frame rate, better tracking, and better controllers for the extra money, though the PSVR is a little more comfortable. But a $100 price disparity is likely small enough that the user's preferred games & gaming platform (PC or PS4) matters more. Certainly the cheaper prices of Steam games will quickly make up the difference.
Re:Oculus in trouble? (Score:4, Informative)
>> The Playstation VR is arguably the best from this generation
By what metric? If just by # of users then OK, but as a VR experience it sucks compared to Rift/Vive.
>> Oculus is still overpriced by about 60% with its new $800 list price.
I think you're confused about the pricing, Vive is $799, Rift including Touch is now $598.
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Price is not the problem. The problem is the lack of public VR competitions. They can see people competing with other games but no FPS VR competition. No duration events, no first team to 100 victories no VR versus keyboard and mouse, just advertising, just selling it like another gimmick. Thanks to other bullshit tech gimmicks, selling a gimmick now is pretty hard, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me and fool me many times, just why the fuck am I still buying their bullshit (it's not like
Re:Oculus in trouble? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Even as a Vive owner I wouldn't be even slightly interested in watching public VR competitions. Actually I suspect that just watching someone else using VR would probably make you actively less likely to want a VR headset yourself.
It seems clear to me that people have to personally experience VR first-hand (in a roomscale not just a seated way) in order to understand how actually cool VR is. Anything else just looks dorky and wierd and doesn't convey the sensation at all.
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I remain to be convinced.
I mean just looking at the hardware specs alone, PSVR is clearly VERY limited compared to PC solution. I'm actually surprised that they could even make it work in any credible way at all with just a regular PS4.
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Is it possible to attach a PSVR set to a real computer?
Playstations aren't going to cut it.
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Don't forget the tracking differences. PSVR has only a single front camera, and cannot see your controllers if you turn around. It can lose sight of your head in some cases too, so it falls somewhat short of true room-scale experiences.
Oculus + Touch has two cameras that cover a much wider field of view, with uninterrupted tracking in most cases. The Vive's lighthouse emitters cover a very wide angle for complete 360 degree tracking, as does the Oculus with an optional third camera.
Not from any of those (Score:2)
Seems like yet more evidence that Oculus must be in serious financial trouble
Ha Ha Ha, they are owned by Facebook, remember? They are in zero financial trouble.
probably both from their Zenimax lawsuit and from Valve/Steam/Vive significantly outselling them.
Nope [businessinsider.com].
Not from any of the ones you mentioned anyway. What is affecting them is Sony, but it's not so much income from sales as the need for more units in people's hands to encourage developer support. THAT is why they are lowering price, because they ha
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> they are owned by Facebook, remember? They are in zero financial trouble.
I guess it depends on Zuckerberg/the Facebook board but most "normal" companies (and I do understand that Facebook isn't one) wouldn't keep funding/supporting a loss-making subsidiary for long.
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probably both from their Zenimax lawsuit and from Valve/Steam/Vive significantly outselling them.
Nope [businessinsider.com].
Isn't his claim backed up by the chart you just linked? Your chart shows that by the end of last year, the Vive was expected to outsell the Rift in terms of cumulative sales over their lifetimes by 25%. If that's not outselling, what is?
It may get worse though, because the Rift has been available in various incarnations since 2012, whereas Vive only entered the market in April of last year. In clicking through to some of the other pages linked from your article [gamesindustry.biz], it sounds like the analysts may have included
Not that different in reality (Score:2)
because the Rift has been available in various incarnations since 2012, whereas Vive only entered the market in April of last year.
Come on, Oculus started shipping real units only at the end of March 2016 [oculus.com], and was heavily supply constrained for a while after that because they had to stop shipping [theregister.co.uk] for a while. They aren't counting dev units (nor should they). Vives were shipping in quantity just a week later around April 7th [vive.com], but they were better at getting units out than Oculus. So by your own arguments I
Barf bags (Score:2)
Start of a price war on VR? (Score:1)
So I wonder if the vive will also reduce in price to not lose market share to the rift.
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That's rather unlikely. They may drop it to the 700ish area, but probably not any further. Their selling point is that they're the only one that offers the "room scale" experience, and I would expect Steam to come out with some games that basically demand you to own a Vive to play them rather than trying to engage in a price war.
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Resolution sucks (Score:1)
If the resolution was 5K per eye it would be good enough to watch movies and tv in it as though you were in a theater. As it is now, the screen door effect is far too intolerable.
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5K per eye? You can't even run twin 4K on one videocard. What you're asking isn't feasible with current technology at consumer-grade cost.
You might as well be seriously complaining "Why don't we all have flying cars yet?!"
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What I meant is that the technology isn't ready yet. It will take about 20 years before we can get 5K per eye displays (at 120fps). They shouldn't be trying to sell these because they aren't ready for the market and it will ruin VR as a concept for a generation. You don't see Ford trying to sell flying cars do you? We don't have the technology to make VR headsets work.
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You don't need 5K resolution. They need higher pixel density displays to eliminate the screen door effect.
That's the cheapest part of the system (Score:2)
You go broke on the video cards for your desktop PC which I dare say that most people don't already own. It's a bit like owning a Ferrari and living in Singapore where the speed limit is 50 mph.