For the next six weeks, the Oculus Rift headset and its matching controllers will cost just $399. That’s $400 less than when it first hit the market, and $200 less than when its price was first slashed in March. It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.
Advertisement
Even so, it’s not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony’s offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.
This story is only available to subscribers.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
Of course, nobody said that rolling out VR would be easy. Three years after Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that it would probably take 10 years or more for VR to reach the mass market. But if prices have to keep falling like this, it looks like VR may be a tougher sell than even Zuck imagined.