He hopes to get to the stage where the hardware can be ”subsidised,” if there’s enough revenue made from software - much like Microsoft and Sony do with consoles.
Currently the VR headgear is only available in dev kit form and isn’t on sale at the consumer level yet. If commercial interest explodes than the price might just evaporate.
“The lower the price point, the wider the audience,” Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe told Edge.
“We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We’d love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won’t be that in the beginning. We’re targeting the $300 price point right now but there’s the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies.”
“You can imagine if Microsoft and Sony can go out and subsidise consoles because there’s enough money to be made on software and other areas, then there’s the potential that this, in partnership, could get subsidised. Let’s say there was some game you played in VR that everybody loved and everybody played and we made $100 a month – or even $10 a month – at some point the hardware’s cheap enough and we’re making enough that we could be giving away the headset.”
“We’re not there yet,” he added, “but we’re sitting there thinking all the time, how can we make this free? You want everybody to play it and the cheaper it is, the more people are going to go out and buy it. Today it’s a $300 dev kit but we’re thinking about how to get it out to as many people as possible.”
Many games in development have been tinkering with Oculus Rift, including Cloud Imperium’s Star Citizen, who argues it would be perfect what with all those starship cockpits to fly in. The challenge then is to convince people this isn’t a repeat of all that cheesy VR stuff from the 80s, and that this isn’t anything like gimmicky 3D TVs.
