The Oculus Rift is now Available for Pre-Order - Price Announced

[Dicehunter]

Ever heard of a loss leader?



It makes perfect sense to me. Get people in to test it en masse while they work out how to lower the cost of manufacturing.

In all honesty I'm not buying it, Investing millions into a product only to sell it at cost is extremely risky.

 

[Feronix]

In all honesty I'm not buying it, Investing millions into a product only to sell it at cost is extremely risky.

Worked for Microsoft with the Xbox 360.

 

[barnsley]

In all honesty I'm not buying it, Investing millions into a product only to sell it at cost is extremely risky.

Better tell Microsoft, Sony et al.

Remember that they are owned by Facebook so money isn't an issue

 

[Dark NighT]

In all honesty I'm not buying it, Investing millions into a product only to sell it at cost is extremely risky.

In this case its good that facebook bought them because they have a big money pile in reserve, tbh without facebook this thing would probably never see the light of day.

 

[Dicehunter]

Worked for Microsoft with the Xbox 360.

I just don't buy that companies do it, Call me a sceptic but I tend not to believe multi billion dollar companies all that much ^_^

 

[Feronix]

I just don't buy that companies do it, Call me a sceptic but I tend not to believe multi billion dollar companies all that much ^_^

It's all about marketshare.

Example:
The Playstation 2 was THE console. It had a monopoly position in the market as there was no decent alternative at that price. That's where Microsoft came in with the xbox 360. By selling it for cost price, and sometimes even at a loss (which Microsoft can afford considering its size), they were able to steal about half the market away from Sony.

So now with the current gen consoles, nearly half the people still bought an xbox one, even if its hardware is inferior to that of the PS4. People buy it because they are already familiar with xbox and its ecosystem.

Besides, the initial sale is not the only income for Microsoft. They have their own store for games, you pay them money for Xbox Live, etc.



So by selling the 360 at cost price, they now have around ~50% ish of the market. See it as an investment.

 

[WYP]

Worked for Microsoft with the Xbox 360.

Remember that Sony and Xbox get money from game sales, Oculus won't.

Sony and Microsoft can afford to sell consoles at cost and make the money off games, but Oculus can't really be a "loss leader"

 

[Feronix]

Remember that Sony and Xbox get money from game sales, Oculus won't.

Sony and Microsoft can afford to sell consoles at cost and make the money off games, but Oculus can't really be a "loss leader"

Depends, Oculus might have something up their sleeves in the form of micro-transactions or accessories that they can make a lot of money on. We don't know yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.

But then again, as I said this is about marketshare. By selling it at a lower price than the competitors, people are more likely to buy the Rift. Once they have become familiar and accustomed to that, it is likely that they will stick with Oculus products.

I'm not sure if they actually ARE selling the Rift at cost price. They might do, they might not. All I'm saying is that it's not so difficult to believe and they might have very legitimate reasons to do so.

 

[AlienALX]

Remember that Sony and Xbox get money from game sales, Oculus won't.

Sony and Microsoft can afford to sell consoles at cost and make the money off games, but Oculus can't really be a "loss leader"

Even if PSVR is £700 by the time you add in the PS4 for £300 or so it will still be far, far cheaper than OR and will likely get much more support and far more games coded for it specifically.

The aim with something like this is to get it into as many homes as you can. That's where 3D and other similar things have died out over the years because they have not made it to the masses, nor were they really affordable to the masses (for example you needed a honkingly expensive 120hz panel and then the "Not really cheap" 3Dvision kit and Herculean graphical might to shove it around).

And whilst VR is a whole different thing to 3D it's sounding startlingly similar to me right now.

Stupid spec PC - check.
Eye wateringly expensive device - check.
Hardly any games coded from the ground up to work on it - check.

 

[Mysterae]

Surprisingly, I didn't pre-order one although I thought I would a few months ago.

Why? An accumulation of lack of content, surprisingly high cost and the competition in the VR arena warming up nicely. To be honest the Vive and Microsoft's HoloLens interest me far more as these aren't one trick ponies (augmented VR, holographic computing).

Talking of horses, there's some cynicism that Facebook's involvement is more than just funding and could be a Trojan Horse. How Facebook will capitalise on the Rift other than getting more users signed up is anyone's guess and conspiracist's theory.

 

[barnsley]

Remember that Sony and Xbox get money from game sales, Oculus won't.

Sony and Microsoft can afford to sell consoles at cost and make the money off games, but Oculus can't really be a "loss leader"

It could very much be a loss leader in the sense that it will enable occulus to establish themselves as 'the' virtual reality headset. By releasing first and potentially cheaper than the competition (yea good luck to sony making a headset with its own processing unit cheaper) they'll grab a huge chunk of the market share that has to stick to Oculus products.

Take a bullet now to stop a war later, I guess?

 

[BigDaddyKong]

Saturday I had the pleasure of taking part in live twitch event from the AteamGC and IamApropos. Quain was very gracious enough to attend and spend a large part of the day interacting with us on GameVox. One of the subjects that we spent a lot of time discussing was the OR and how it worked. We had a discussion about how VR renders on screen and what it takes to make it work.

This brings me to this question, until now, many game developments depend on multi platform release schedules tend to be designed around the lowest common denominator. Are we going to see games now being designed with VR in mind, taking at a minimum of 4x the horsepower similar to rendering 4 independent 1080 screens at once. Are we going to see the games scaled back to meet these requirements instead of driving new desktop experiences for top end hardware.