Oculus sparked the interest of developers in Virtual Reality when it launched the Rift through a Kickstarter campaign. It was easily a success story.
With backers joining in the latest reboot of Virtual Reality, the campaign managed to raise $2.5 million for the development of the product. Backers that first pledged $300 or above were the first ones to get their hands on the the Rift prototype, and it was later sold on the company's website.
Oculus easily made a killing out of the DK1, selling 4-5 units per minute. Oculus wanted to keep prices on the downlow and sold its successor for $350 a piece. Much has changed since then, and Oculus is preparing the consumer version of the Rift. But the price would prove to be much steeper, contrary to popular belief that the company itself made the world believe.
"You know, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. We're roughly in that ballpark... but it's going to cost more than that." said Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey in an interview with RoadToVR.com. "And the reason for that is that we've added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days.
"It's just the reality that when you make this thing, you have to decide what tradeoffs you're going to make," Luckey said. "Are you going to optimize for absolute lowest price possible, even if it's going to be a lower quality experience?"
Luckey believes that the quality of the experience comes first, and in resorting to optimizing for the absolute lowest price would result into unfavorable trade-offs, which in turn, would lead to the possible disappointment of new users on tech that had cut corners.
For those that want a more budget-oriented offering, Samsung offers the Gear VR at $99. However, it requires a Samsung smartphone that would add to the total cost. HTC and Valve's Vive still does not have an official price tag as of yet, so the fog still has not cleared yet if the competition in the Virtual Reality spectrum will be healthy.
