It’s been a whirlwind week for the Oculus Rift and Palmer Luckey. Many people may not have been prepared for the price tag that came with preorder openings, but it hasn’t stopped folks from snatching up their reservations for the device. The latest batch of preordered Oculus Rift devices won’t ship until June this year.
This has not been announced officially, but over on the preorder page for the Rift, the expected delivery date has now shifted from a previously stated May back to June 2016.
Even despite the continued growth of preorders for the Rift, OculusVR founder Palmer Luckey went to Reddit to do some damage control over words he’d said in the past about the price of the Rift. Luckey stated flatly that he and his group “handled the messaging poorly”.
Specifically, Luckey brought up when it was stated earlier last year that the Rift, plus a computer to run it, would cost $1500:
”I made the infamous ‘roughly in that $350 ballpark, but it will cost more than that’ quote,” Luckey states. ”As an explanation, not an excuse: during that time, many outlets were repeating the ‘Rift is $1500!’ line, and I was frustrated by how many people thought that was the price of the headset itself. My answer was ill-prepared, and mentally, I was contrasting $349 with $1500, not our internal estimate that hovered close to $599 - that is why I said it was in roughly the same ballpark.”
Either way, it would appear that the Oculus is doing very well in the preorder phase. That said, there are also competitors on the horizon and it may become a competition of pricing later on this year or into 2017. It doesn’t appear that VR is anywhere close to going away anytime soon.
