Earlier today the Oculus CV1 preorders opened on oculus.com, to much complaining of the $599 price tag. I have pre-ordered mine, as I really do like my DK2 and DK1. I find it interesting that people are so agitated about the high price of this new device. Of course a high-end device like this will be expensive, most monitors with a similar display are not that far away in price. You do also need hardware that can push at least 75 frames per second, though 90fps will be much better from what I’ve heard. The high system requirements are another point that is causing people to complain.
It also probably didn’t help that Palmer Luckey has said in the past that they were planning on releasing the CV1 at a price point ‘in the ballpark of $350’. This price certainly isn’t anywhere near that, and people in other countries (Canada and many European countries especially) have noticed that their price is much higher than the price in the United States, even when you count in the differences between currencies. I think that a large portion of this would be taxes, as from what I remember of Europe, the tax is usually included in the price of a product.
As in interseting aside, Palmer Luckey posted this to Twitter:
Even with the high price-point, it sounds like a large number of people do want the CV1, as people, including me, have pre-ordered the device. I wonder what their numbers really look like. New orders will probably ship in May as of the time of this posting, so I’m guessing that a lot of people did probably buy the device. Also he has had an AMA on Reddit, he says that he won’t be doing any more ‘ballparking’ as it was a very bad idea. Evidently some media outlets had been announcing that the oculus would cost $1500 and he wanted to use the $350 to contrast it. Yes, I think that the ‘ballparking’ may have been a bad idea in that case.
From what I’ve heard on reddit from people that have gotten to try out the non-released devkits, and more recently the pre-cv1s each time they show off a new device, it has a much higher quality than its predecessors. Thanks to that, and my fondness of VR, I’m looking forward to recieving my Oculus CV1 in the near future.
Well, that’s all for now, I hope that you have an awesome day. Also I think that this image is a very good interpretation of what’s been going on at the Oculus subreddit over the last day…