Oculus Rift will Fail and Here's Why.

1) Price of $600 is flat out ridiculous, and an utter rip off.

2)The PC needed to run it must be of very high specs, Nvidia has stated only 13 million out of 1.4 billion PC's worldwide will be able to power Oculus.

Therefore if the PS4's VR system releases at a mere $299 and is a simple plug and play and works perfectly with every PS4 system then the Oculus is dead in the water.

I dont think its going to sell 10's of millions. There will be a niche market.

But, will it outsell the Wii U!?

and then the PS4 experience will be limited.... and people will lose interest and write it off as a gimmick because of a s*itty little closed platform with very little room for modding....

double edged sword be damned.

@loco145:

That's shouldn't be hard over the devices lifetime

Why was there a question mark at the end of your topic title? That was a statement, not a question.

The first ones to release the low-grade version will make major bank.

Not exactly a fresh take on the topic, eh?

Although it's highly unlikely that the PS4 VR solution will cost $299.

-Byshop

Sorry type-o..my bad...it's been fixed

I do not accept your apology. Such an egregious affront to decency has never been seen by human eyes. It makes me sick just thinking about the atrocity that was committed here today.

Maybe, but i guarantee now that Sony is aware of the Oculus price point they will under cut them, as they did with the Xbox One when the two consoles were released.

Your revelation is just echoing what pretty much every other thread and comment has said since Tuesday.

As for Sony, like any piece of hardware they'll sell it as cheaply as they can without losing their shirts. I'm guessing they'll come in under $600 but nobody knows for sure.

-Byshop

$600 for 1:1 VR that's never been accomplished on a mass market level is not ridiculous. It's virtual reality. Real, working virtual reality. The stuff people have been wanting for over 25 years and have talked about for way longer than that.

If the Oculus Rift, which is a superior VR device to the PSVR (unless they drastically improve the specs of the PSVR), requires a very powerful PC to deliver a great VR experience, what hope does the PS4 have? You can't take a GPU that was weak even in 2013 and expect it to do what a GPU that is considered high end in 2015 can't. It's delusional to think that.

This is the first gen of devices. First gen of brand new tech always has low adaptation rates as the market adjusts. That's really not a point of argument as Oculus themselves has fully acknowledged their sales projections are not very high (high hundred thousands at best) because of the high entry barrier. Facebook didn't buy this for a quick return on their investment, they bought this for the long run.

Being the first, "cheap" VR to market doesn't mean shit if the VR experience isn't great. The impressions of the PSVR we've had so far have been positive, but they were mostly stacked up against early Oculus Rift DK1 and some DK2 demos, neither of which represent what Oculus Rift CV1 is.

The first impressions I've heard about the Rift CV1 from CES have been absolutely glowing. Everything the DK2 was has been completely changed and improved on. The image quality is better, the virtual reality is smoother and more natural, the comfort of the device is very high, the headtracking is rock solid, and the entire device is extremely well built. People are also going to be powering the CV1 with more powerful hardware than they powered the DK1 and DK2 with so the horsepower the games have to render better is higher which will result in a smoother experience than people had with the dev kids.

Yes it's expensive, but it's crazy to think that proper VR is going to be cheap. Even the HTC Vive is rumored to cost over $600 now. PSVR is going to be a gimmick as the games will never amount to anything enjoyable for the long run. They'll be good for wowing people for 5-10 minutes but not for really immersing yourself in a VR world for long period of time. The latter of which is necessary for VR to survive.

Yeah they probably will, not that big a deal really. The pre-orders for oculus already went ballistic so it's not really dead in the water, i'd say there are a lot of people hanging on to see what the other two bits of gear are priced before they buy in.

Hopefully it sticks around for another generation at least.

Announcing $600 was them just announcing their death sentence. NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND will pay $600 for something that's been unproven, in an already niche market. They might as well go ahead and file for Chapter 11 NOW while they're ahead.

$300 would have been just fine. Palmer Pluckey is defending this all day on Twitter saying this is obscenely cheap "Like a 120" 4K OLED TV would be insanely cheap for $600" A 120" 4K OLED TV has been proven to be fantastic and $600 is a fucking bargain. $600 for something no one even knows much about is NOT, he's a damn fool.

Sony GOT AWAY with PS3 being $600 as they already had TENS OF MILLIONS of loyal fans and eventually the price went down and they stole the top spot from Xbox 360 fairly quickly. Oculus Rift has no chance in hell and no killer app game to back it up with.

Aren't we forgetting that the occulus will probably be better than the morpheus?

@Wasdie:

Mr. Gambini that was a very lucid, intelligent, well thought out objection............OVER RULED !!!

New tech does not have to be at such high prices...Example....the Wii was the first motion control game system ever released and i believe it launched at $299 or $249...point is requiring a high end PC is asking enough the least they could do is make the Oculus a bit more affordable to the general public...even $400 would be an improvement.

It's going to be a slow burn. Oculus, PlayStation, and HTC are playing the long game here, not aiming for immediate millions sold.

Hopefully, the HTC Vive will be cheaper. Either way, they're getting what they know people will pay at launch. The prices will eventually go down a bit...

@Slimmin360: While the Wii and the Rift share a lot of similar properties, the tech the Wii took from to build the motion controls was nothing new. The components had been used in other devices before and were all relatively cheap. They just combined them in a new way that could be used for controls.

High quality visual displays, optics (camera lenses), and headtracking are all far more expensive than the components. Even today, a good 1440p screen still costs over $400. Cellphones with high quality 1440p displays rarely sell for under $400 too. The rift uses two very high quality, extremely low latency, low persistent, 90hz 1080x1200 monitors. These monitors are individually adjustable so you can get a crystal clear picutre out of both eyes. This requires extra mechanical engineering and extra, adjustable mounts. The optics used for the lenses are comparable to that which come with DSLR cameras, not just two little pieces of curved plastic. The headtracking is also far more advanced than headtracking in the $150 TrackIR. The device ended up being quite light weight and was built around extreme comfort so you could wear them for awhile. It also comes with a little remote control to help with controlling software while in VR.

You can't ignore that all of this technology is extremely expensive. This device falls more in line with the first line of HDTVs as expensive advances in visual technology. It's not cheap and never was going to be. They are selling the device basically at cost and it's coming out at $600. Comparing the Oculus Rift to a Wii Mote is absolutely laughable. The Rift is infinity more complex than the Wii Mote. Hell the original Wii Mote didn't even have 1:1 tracking. That was added later.

Cheaper VR is going to compromise the image quality and headtracking and not provide as good of an experience.

People interested in new technology will pay any price to get something new. Day One stock was sold out after 14 minutes. So yeah...

People will pay $600.... This is what a rip-off looks like:

It's a niche prduct for now. VR solves a real problem though (How can you make a person feel present in a place that is hard/expensive/impossible to visit?). It will win in the long run.

@Sushiglutton said:

People will pay $600.... This is what a ripp-off looks like:

It's a niche prduct for now. VR solves a real problem (How can you make a person feel present in a place that is hard/expensive/impossible to visit?). It will win in the long run.

Not really a rip-off since you can still get acccess to the game for $45 (I believe). The expensive ships are for those who WANT to pledge that much money to the game's development, the ship being a reward/thank you.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/01/06/oculus_rift_s_price_sparks_backlash_but_gamers_are_buying_it_anyway.html

the device will sell at a profit, so it will be fine. I don't know what the software is like, but if an algorithm could translate regular software into the Oculus hardware then there's no problem there either.

There's a lot of hardware in it and a lot of it is custom designed for the Oculus. DSLR lenses, two high pixel density high refresh rate displays, a 3D positional tracking system, an acceleratometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, audio system, all the hardware necessary to process all of this.

-Byshop

lol amazon posted PlayStation VR headset for $810 i wonder

This was never going to be a product aimed at the average consumer with the goal to sell millions right off the bat. Like any piece of very new technology, the migration towards it will be very gradual, and I'm those those over at Oculus expect that.

It's not immune to failure, but if that does happen it likely won't be for the reasons you've specified.

It will not fail. Reason? Porn. Really is that simple.

It's really hard to gauge the exact value of a lot of the stuff in the Oculus because there's no consumer electronics equivalent. The DK2 has a phone display in it and as a result the resolution was too low for the final product. The level of accuracy that they need for VR is much higher than is required for a cell phone's accelerometer, plus everything has to be super lightweight because it's wearable tech. Then you have the 3D tracking system that reads the location and position of the HMD. We can try to gauge the cost of the lenses and the screens but the rest of it is pretty VR specific and we don't have any real specs on that. But when you add all this together, it's a lot so I'm inclined to take their claim that they aren't making money on the hardware at face value. This price isn't doing them any favors so it would be really dumb for them to try to make a few bucks per unit at the cost of all the negative press they are getting over the price.

-Byshop

If Nvidia markets out the OR to different companies like its video cards, it shouldn't take too long for prices to drop.

At the end of the day, it's a crazy new game experience for the cost of a graphics card. Unless someone can make an intelligible argument that the graphics card market is crumbling due to price, you're not going to convince me that Occulus is doomed.

It's going to be funny looking back at some of these comments years from now.

Pascal and Polaris will change the spec range.

The main problem being is that it's overpriced in my opinion. The Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. That's something you'll never experience on consoles.

The price is not at all ridiculous; the people who thought that the first good virtual reality headset was going to be cheap are what's ridiculous. Cutting edge technology is always going to be expensive and out of reach for the mass market consumers at first. Enthusiasts are the main targets at first and it seems to be doing pretty well with the enthusiasts thus far considering that they are already sold out of their stock until June as of this morning. And then over time, the early adopters will show it to their friends, and if it delivers an incredible new experience which anyone who has tried the Oculus Rift can tell you it succeeds at doing, then their friends will get excited to get one themselves as the prices drop, and thus the market will gradually keep getting bigger.

The current price of the Oculus Rift is comparable to the price that VCRs, DVD players, and Blu-ray players were when they first launched and just like VCRs, DVD players, and Blu-ray players were sold to enthusiasts at first but then eventually dropped to a more mass market friendly price, so will the Oculus Rift. Did you also think that VCRs, DVD players, and Blu-ray players would all fail too when they were first released at around the same "ridiculous" price that the Oculus Rift is being released at?

TC be jelly.

I'm tempted to bookmark these myopic predictions that VR will fail outright predicated on the flimsiest, most shortsighted predictions imaginable, but VR will speak for itself. Then these people will slowly try to fade into the background and deny they made these predictions at all, years from now when no one remembers. VR has Steam and Facebook behind them. Multi-billion dollar enterprises that are putting their full backing into them. Costs will reduce. Tech will improve. Will VR become the standard? I highly doubt it. But it will survive and flourish.

All that's required for VR to succeed is time. I don't know why people are so objectionable to this, when the Wii was announced many seemed to embrace that idea with open arms, yet it turned out to be garbage. Now, a tech with real potential arrives and people wish its death before it even arrives.

It's going to to take a while. It's probably going to be niche for the next 2 to 5 years but eventually when prices come down it will be successful.

$600 is too much for something that may or may not improve my gaming experience to a significant degree. My PC has the specs for Oculus but I'm at a place where I'd rather spend that money on improving and future proofing my PC even more than spending it on a VR headset. I think Sony has the best approach for VR. If they price it well the rewards will be incredible. Many people will get to experience VR for the first time for a fraction of the cost at which it would take to get the OR experience and it could really change the entire industry. If VR takes off in the next few years it will be Sony leading the charge because they currently are in the best position to do so unless they really screw up the price.

The sooner porn goes onto the device the better, I really want VR to be the next big thing and whatever has the porn industry proves to be just that, the next big thing.

I am excited. I pre-ordered one. Sure, it is expensive, but it is amazing. I am mainly getting it to use in my racing simulator setup. So, I know I will have a very practical use for it. I don't mind paying the high entry price as long as the quality is there. I definitely fall into the enthusiast category they are targeting. It is new tech and it will only continue to improve and get cheaper. I may cancel my pre-order and get the Vive or StarVR though. I dunno, at least I have secured it for now and I still have options.

Yeah, no shit.

Sony's might sell more in the short run, but just watch it fizzle out as Sony doesn't support the damn thing meaning people dropped $300+ on a useless peripheral. In saying that, I do think Oculus will sell more.

Also, just out of curiousity. When people create threads like this, do they give themselves a little pat on the back for coming up with something so original and thought out?

Will not be buying anything thats above $100.. the playstation VR is a no buy if it higher than $100