In an increasingly active market with PSVR running away with the vast share of it (market numbers put psvr at 700k units vive 420k rift 220k in 2016) I guess oculus or their corporate paymasters wanted to increase their sales numbers a bit
So they've knocked 200 dollars off the price of the rift+touch bundle which takes it from 798 dollars to 598 more in the realm of the psvr's 500 dollar price tag. Of course you still need a fairly good pc to run the thing so psvr still has a lower tco even if you go for the ps4 pro to drive it.
Not sure if this is a desperate move or some sort of cut the price since we have vast facebook billions so can just run at a loss while everyone else goes out of business sort of move or a combination of reasons.
VR is niche market to the extreme but even in that niche the rift hasn't gained as much market share as the other players and with a load of people about to drop their own vr headsets competition on price is likely to become more fierce.
It's looking increasingly like valves "we provide a platform that anyone can use" with the opening up of their lighthouse modular tracker tech and steamvr being the smart long term play since they will benefit from any steamvr headset being released in sales through steam.
Not sure how people who've relatively recently shelled out the big bucks to get the rift and touch will feel. It seems like a similar move to the early xbox which had a large price slash after disappointing launch sales, in that instance they gave away a controller and games package to the early adopters to keep them sweet.
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Seems like a desperate move to me. Hopefully I get a free game or something out of it ... but I am not holding my breath.
I don't think it's panic. I think it's saying "if you have one, you're an early adopter but now we have to compete". And that's OK.
Yeah, pissed off but then that's modern markets for you. They can't leave the price so high. I think Rift will be looking at releasing something new and they can't make that even more expensive than the Rift is now.
I agree. I am not sure the intellectual property for a lot of the tracking stuff is worth as much as all that. It's much better to flood the market with devices and options than it is to hold jealously onto the standard. I want to quote the Betamax/VHS standard war here but I think it might be a little too old to be useful. Sony should have licensed it cheaper for sure.
It's all exciting stuff and I am still blown away by the experiences I've had on Big R's!
I'm not convinced it's about being competitive nothing has changed in the market recently there are no new competitors (there are some on the horizon but no one with production ready hardware just prototypes) they are already price competitive with their main competition in the pc space the vive. It could be the opening shot of a price war with oculus trying to force HTC out of the market while they still have some conceivable chance of making oculus home the vr platform everyone uses.
It think that's very unlikely they only just completed the rift as a complete unit with touch controls in october they are likely going to focus on getting that sold before they come out with a rift 2. I've no doubt there are dev teams working on a successor but I don't think we will hear any sort of whisper of it till next year at the earliest unless something drastically changes. Any hint of a rift 2 at this stage would only destroy their sales for the existing rift people would go "no need to get the crap old one as rift 2 is out in a short while. while it's down 200 bucks its already fucking expensive I'll wait for the better one".
I think having the offer of the tracking tech drops the barrier for entry. To roll your own is costly and requires a lot of disparate technologies to achieve in and above the already highly complex task of putting together a HMD and touch controls. I mean both oculus and vive spent years of R&D to get to this point. Having that easy to use is more likely to lead to more devices on the market and with the steamvr approach it even frees things up for you to potentially pick and chose which controllers you use and pair with which headset it will lead to more options for the consumer.
It's also more than the tracking aspect it's about content. If you roll your own tracking you've got to convince developers to patch their stuff to work with your version or write new stuff for it. If it just plugs directly into steamvr with little or no alteration you've got all the stuff there ready to go to sell the headset and controllers. I mean look back to the days before direct input took over as the standard for input devices then you rolled your own and there was a good chance you would pick wrong end up with only one or two games that support your device and it would just die a death. These days if you just make sure your weird and wonderful controller keyboard steeringwheel peddle hotas hybrid mouse pad thing has direct input support and it'll plug right in to anything.
The drop in price of the headset isn't too significant, it is a small(ish) percentage (10%) and it has been out for a while; the drop in price in the touch is huge, large percentage (47.6%), it hasn't been out long, they have cut the price on the sensors a fair bit too ... plus the official store no longer sell the rift without the touch.
This just Oculus admitting\accepting\promoting\enforcing that the rift needs the touch controllers, and to a lesser extent room scale, and it is about time; but they could be a bit nicer to the early adopters in how they go about it.
it was a massive miscalculation on their part to launch without touch and it has cost them in terms of sales. I might well have gone with the rift if they had touch from launch it certainly would have been a more difficult choice of which to go with.
I don't rule them out as the race is still barely off the starting blocks but they've certainly lost some of the momentum they had in the early kickstarter days when they were the peoples favorite ... before they sold out to the facebook billions
I hada quick check on Reddit, Apprently a new game call Robo Recall has been release free to people who already had touch. I will have to check this out tonight; in which case I get my freee thing so will be happy.
That was from the Epic deal where Oculus/Facebook paid for its development that predates the price drop. So it is a free thing but one you would have gotten anyway.