Oculus is temporarily cutting down the price of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to match cheaper rivals like the PlayStation VR. Oculus, the company acquired by Facebook Inc. in 2014 for US$3 billion, is taking steps to discover if the price has been the bottleneck for the device to become the bestseller in the bunch.
The Oculus Rift starting Monday is priced at US$399, including the Touch controllers. The price reduction will run for six weeks as Facebook targets to determine whether price had been the major roadblock why its immersive gaming and stories did not take off, Oculus vice president for content Jason Rubin said in a statement.Selling a device at, or even below, cost has been a fairly standard practice for videogame console manufacturers for decades. The idea is that you take a loss on the hardware, and make your profit with licensing fees and the like on the back end, once your platform is established. Normally, though, a firm that's planning to pursue this strategy does so right out the gate; Facebook initially priced the Rift at US$600, though, a price that didn't even include the Touch controllers, which weren't even available when the headset launched.
At the time, Oculus seemed confident that the buzz surrounding VR as a whole would see the Rift selling like hotcakes even at that premium price, but the Rift is now well behind HTC's Vive in total sales, and even the two of them combined can't come close to matching Sony's PS VR sales numbers, which is why Oculus slashed US$200 off the price earlier this year. Agressively matching Sony's price is the obvious next move, but with Oculus' identity as a premium-priced product already well and truly established, and the general public showing very little interest even in Sony's budget-priced offering, I have serious doubts about whether this move will prompt consumers to suddenly start buying Rift sets in large numbers.
Look, if you've been eying the Oculus Rift with envy, and only waiting for the price to drop before buying, than go ahead and buy one. It's your money; you do you. VR does not currently enable any new experiences; it can only be used to buff a limited set of familiar experiences. Someone first needs to identify a VR activity that can only be achieved with VR, and that I'll actually want to do; on that glorious day, if and when it comes, I will start comparison shopping for VR headsets. But until then, even at US$399, and even with the Touch controllers included for that price, the Oculus Rift is simply not useful enough to be worth that kind of money.
VR started the year by posting terrible sales numbers across the board; I've seen nothing since then to suggest that VR sales have improved significantly. Against that backdrop, for distant fourth place Oculus to be slashing their price point by half looks more like desperation than strategy.