Oculus Rift Just Cut Price For 3rd Time This Year
This week the folks at Oculus cut the price of bundle packages for the Oculus Rift. The headset's price point is a permanent change, coming because the company suggests they want to "get VR into more people's hands." This comes a few months after Oculus Rift's main opposition – the HTC VIVE – got its own price drop to $599 – that's below the whopping $799 the device cost in the first place.
With the Rift bundle, users will get the Oculus Rift itself, touch controllers, sensors, and a set of free VR apps to start one's own collection. This set of apps includes Robo Recall, Quill, and Medium too. These apps make the initial VR app universe seem diverse and solid – from there, in the Oculus store, not every app is quite so magnificent, but a lot of them are.
The Oculus Rift does not need the touch controllers to function – but as long as you're buying one, you might as well get the other. The same goes for the initial set of apps that come with the Oculus bundle – Lucky's Tale, Medium, Toybox, Quill, Dead and Buried, Dragon Front, and Robo Recall, but they are some rather magnificent apps to get started with.
This should throw the folks in charge of the pricing for HTC Vive for a bit of a loop. While Oculus Rift has been on sale for $399 in the past, a permanent move to $399 is a fairly big deal – especially compared to the device's original price at $798 (that's for the Rift and Touch bundle, essentially what's being discussed today).
So the price of the Oculus Rift VR headset went like this:
Pre-March 2017: $798
March 1st: $598
October 11th: $399
This is happening not just because Oculus wants to get more headsets on people's faces. It's happening because the cost of parts and manufacturing is going down as the company continues to order the exact same parts and process to construct. It's also getting a price drop because Facebook wants to continue to move into VR, and they can't do that unless the Oculus Rift is on the heads – or at least available – to one massive number of users across the planet.
Meanwhile you're going to want to have a peek at the other headset Oculus revealed today. It's pretty... different.