CES 2016: Oculus Rift Price and Release Date Window Revealed

The Rift headset will include built-in headphones and mic and come packaged with a sensor and an Xbox One controller.

The price of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset has been announced, with it set to cost $599 before tax in the USA, and £499 with tax in the UK.

Pre-orders will begin shipping 28 March, but it’s unclear when the headset will be launched officially in South Africa.

The Oculus Rift is expected to ship to end users during March 2016.

Oculus is starting off the new year with a bang; the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is now up and ready for pre-orders. Oculus showed off Rift and most of the features back at a press event in June. Though, given the beefy PC specs required to run modern PC games in VR, it’s highly likely that the Oculus Rift’s price won’t be an issue for early adopters. Presumably this will continue to slip as pre-orders build, so if you’re desperate for one this side of Christmas, you should put your money down sooner rather than later.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Rift sells considering the fairly high price point.

Two games will be included free of charge, Lucky’s Tale, a Super Mario-like game and Eve: Valkyrie, a space dogfighting game. In September 2014, Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey expected the consumer model to cost under 0. Now, Facebook owns this company which has gone a long way.

Those who pre-order the Rift will also get priority waiting list options for the Oculus Touch, the virtual reality controller unveiled at E3 last June.