An Oculus Rift, a new 3D gaming solution that’s a little bit like strapping a pair of computer monitors to your eyes, is pretty expensive. You can pick up a dev kit for three hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money for a graphics peripheral. However, the developers are hoping to give the unit a drastic price cut.
Very drastic.
“The lower the price point, the wider the audience,” Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said. “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.”
The idea is that the potential of the Oculus Rift might be enough to have a big company like Microsoft and Sony subsidize it. “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.”
He went on to say that, while the company isn’t there yet, free Oculus Rift headsets will be their eventual goal. “We’re sitting there thinking all the time, how can we make this free?”
Source: PC Gamer