Virtual Reality

Skanda_sl said:

Palmer has mentioned on Twitter that they have seen a "massive" amount of attempted credit card fraud from idiots trying to pre-order and said to expect dates to shift forward as they cancel those fraudulent orders. Either way, with the ship dated being so close to the new Vive consumer release and the price I don't really see a down side to waiting to see when the price on the Vive is.

I'm curious to see how is AMA is going to go tonight. As late as October he was still saying the CV was going to be close to DK price. It could be a massive train wreck tonight.

Click to expand...

Skanda_sl said:

It's not the price that seems to have people upset so much as the fact that Palmer has been claiming that the CV was close to the same price as the DK. If he had done a better job of managing expectations I don't think you would see all this disappointment around.

2013:If something's even $600, it doesn't matter how good it is, how great of an experience it is - if they just can't afford it, then it really might as well not exist.
2014:"We want to stay in that $200-$400 price range," he states.
Sep 2015:You know, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. We're roughly in that ballpark (of the DK2 price). but it's going to cost more than that.

So just four months ago he was still claiming to be close to the price of the two development kits. He has done a terrible job of managing expectations regarding the price. All along he's been building peoples expectations that the CV would be close to the 350 mark and then they nearly double that.

Click to expand...

Palmer_sl said:

I handled the messaging poorly. Earlier last year, we started officially messaging that the Rift+Recommended spec PC would cost roughly $1500. That was around the time we committed to the path of prioritizing quality over cost, trying to make the best VR headset possible with current technology. Many outlets picked the story up as "Rift will cost $1500!", which was honestly a good thing - the vast majority of consumers (and even gamers!) don't have a PC anywhere close to the rec. spec, and many people were confused enough to think the Rift was a standalone device. For that vast majority of people, $1500 is the all-in cost of owning Rift. The biggest portion of their cost is the PC, not the Rift itself.

For gamers that already have high end GPUs, the equation is obviously different. In a September interview, during the Oculus Connect developer conference, I made the infamous "roughly in that $350 ballpark, but it will cost more than that" quote. As an explanation, not an excuse: during that time, many outlets were repeating the "Rift is $1500!" line, and I was frustrated by how many people thought that was the price of the headset itself. My answer was ill-prepared, and mentally, I was contrasting $349 with $1500, not our internal estimate that hovered close to $599 - that is why I said it was in roughly the same ballpark. Later on, I tried to get across that the Rift would cost more than many expected, in the past two weeks particularly. There are a lot of reasons we did not do a better job of prepping people who already have high end GPUs, legal, financial, competitive, and otherwise, but to be perfectly honest, our biggest failing was assuming we had been clear enough about setting expectations. Another problem is that people looked at the much less advanced technology in DK2 for $350 and assumed the consumer Rift would cost a similar amount, an assumption that myself (and Oculus) did not do a good job of fixing. I apologize.

To be perfectly clear, we don't make money on the Rift. The Xbox controller costs us almost nothing to bundle, and people can easily resell it for profit. A lot of people wish we would sell a bundle without "useless extras" like high-end audio, a carrying case, the bundled games, etc, but those just don't significantly impact the cost. The core technology in the Rift is the main driver - two built-for-VR OLED displays with very high refresh rate and pixel density, a very precise tracking system, mechanical adjustment systems that must be lightweight, durable, and precise, and cutting-edge optics that are more complex to manufacture than many high end DSLR lenses. It is expensive, but for the $599 you spend, you get a lot more than spending $599 on pretty much any other consumer electronics devices - phones that cost $599 cost a fraction of that to make, same with mid-range TVs that cost $599. There are a lot of mainstream devices in that price-range, so as you have said, our failing was in communication, not just price.

Click to expand...