The Oculus Rift price has been revealed and it well beyond all expectations.
While Oculus founder Palmer Luckey hinted previously at a $350 ~ $450 price range, the final Oculus Rift price turned out to be $599 in the U.S., £499 in the UK and €699 in Europe.
This represents a radical turn around for Luckey who had told All Things D in 2013 that "If something’s even $600, it doesn’t matter how good it is, how great of an experience it is -- if they just can’t afford it, then it really might as well not exist."
Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook in 2014 and – in case you didn't guess it already – this change of philosophy is a result of Facebook's money which allowed the team to expand their vision for the virtual reality headset.
Luckey discussed the matter with Polygon and explained that:
"The Facebook resources allowed us ... to say we want to make custom panels. What would a made-for-virtual-reality panel look like? How high can we push the refresh rate on these panels, how low can we push the persistence, how high fill can we get on these? What can we do with multiple displays with optics that are a sealed package and move to adjust [interpupillary distance]?
After the major upgrades the company made to its prototype hardware post-acquisition, "It was hard to look at what we had made before and say, 'Yeah, this is consumer-ready, this is what everyone is going to want'."
"We decided, in the end, to optimize quality over cost," he summed it up before noting that the headset is selling faster than expected despite its steep price point.
