Pre-orders for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset are now live, and its price was revealed as well at $599. Now the founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, has taken to Twitter to respond to complaints that the VR hardware is simply too expensive, stating that the Rift's price is in fact relatively cheap.
Luckey stated:
"To reiterate, we are not making money on Rift hardware. High end VR is expensive, but Rift is obscenely cheap for what it is.""It is obscenely cheap in the same way a $599 120" 4K OLED TV would be obscenely cheap - more for 599 than most products."
In related news, the official Oculus blog stated that the Rift headset would also go on sale "in limited locations at select retailers" sometime in April, but details were not announced. The first shipments of the Rift to pre-orders are scheduled to head out on March 28.
People who pre-order the Rift will get a box with the headset itself, along with an Xbox One controller with a wireless adapter. It also comes with another device, the Oculus Remote:
"The Oculus Remote is a new input device we designed to make it simple and intuitive to navigate VR experiences. With Remote, you can easily browse the Oculus store, explore 360 video content in Oculus Video, or experience a wide range of VR games and entertainment. It is the easiest way to introduce non-gamers to VR."
Oculus also offered the final recommends PC hardware specs to run games on the Rift:
- Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- Memory: 8GB+ RAM
- Output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- Input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
- Pperating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
Finally, full gaming PC systems that will be bundled with an Oculus Rift will start to go on sale in February for prices beginning at $1499.
Source: Palmer Luckey (Twitter), Oculus
