Even though development kits of the Oculus Rift are floating around, a release date for the consumer product has yet to be announced, but Oculus VR is still working away at making one available as soon as possible.
VR isn’t really that old of a concept, but the Oculus–and other devices like it–is certainly revitalising it to a degree, so it would be natural to assume that such a product would be pretty expensive. Personally, I wouldn’t be that surprised if it cost more than an Xbox One.
However, in an interview with GamesIndustry (via GameSpot ), Oculus VR founder Palmer Lucky explained that the company isn’t looking to make the Oculus Rift a “rich person’s toy.” Instead, Lucky is adamant that the company wants the Oculus to be something that “pretty much anyone” can afford.
“[Price] is to be determined but what I’ve always said is that if VR isn’t affordable it might as well not exist for most people,” Lucky explained to GamesIndustry. “We’re not looking to make a rich person’s toy, we’re not looking to make a research tool.
We want to make a consumer VR headset that pretty much anyone can afford,” he continued. “You can’t sell an expensive piece of hardware and expect tons of content to show up. We’re not doing market research around what’s the breaking point for people to buy a VR headset; we’re just trying to sell it as cheap as we can while still existing as a company.”
The Oculus Rift is likely to have some competition in its way later down the line, as Sony is rumoured to unveil its own VR headset at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Oculus VR have also been collaborating with Valve to help drive VR forward by 2015 . What’s more, Oculus VR recently encountered some problems with producing new Oculus Rifts due to certain components no longer being manufactured, which has put future distributions of the Oculus dev kits on hold.