Another Price Slash Suggests the Oculus Rift Is Dead in the Water

technologyreview.com ^ | July 10, 2017 | Jamie Condliffe

[Berlin_Freeper]

Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s early enthusiasm for virtual reality, the technology has stubbornly remained a hard sell for Facebook (50 Smartest Companies 2017). Now, in yet another sign that VR is failing to capture the imagination of the public, the company has just cut the price of its Oculus Rift hardware for the second time this year.

For the next six weeks, the Oculus Rift headset and its matching controllers will cost just $399. That’s $400 less than when it first hit the market, and $200 less than when its price was first slashed in March. It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.

Even so, it’s not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony’s offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.

Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn’t a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available. Don’t believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.

Of course, nobody said that rolling out VR would be easy. Three years after Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that it would probably take 10 years or more for VR to reach the mass market. But if prices have to keep falling like this, it looks like VR may be a tougher sell than even Zuck imagined.

[sparklite2]

That’s good to hear. What I’ve seen is atrocious.

[fuzzylogic]

I have Google Earth on Oculus, it is simply astonishing. Many cities/locations are full texture-mapped 3D, from satellite data. There’s also 360 degree 3D video. I just bought “Elite Dangerous”, the graphics are very much not 1992 :)

[Magnatron]

"All the VR graphics I have seen look like something from 1992."

These units all suffer from poor resolution and worse, the screen door effect. For the price of hardware and the unit itself, until they move past theses things, I don't see sales really bumping.

[Yaelle]

My son has it and works on the games. I’ve tried it and yeah, it can definitely make me queasy. Very cool though. He had to redesign his room for it.

[zipper]

I think we’re a long way from packing a (currently) 600 dollar liquid-cooled gaming video card into a phone.

Or there could be a breakthrough in technology and it could happen next year!

[zipper]

Virtually no pixelation (”screen door effect”) on mine, certainly not enough for distraction. Iif you’re experiencing that your video card isn’t good enough.

[RightFighter]

Playing The Climb, you literally feel like you are going to fall to your death. They need to integrate heartrate monitoring into these VR systems. I bet what you’d see would be really crazy.