Facebook’s Oculus cuts price for Rift’s VR headset by $100

The $599 Rift headset and $199 Touch controllers have both had their prices cut by $100, bringing the bundled price of the two VR products to $598.

Given Oculus recently reduced the minimum specs required to power the Rift too accommodate $500 PCs, the overall adoption price has dropped significantly. Hypothetically, coupling the $499 and new $598 price tag of the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers still brings the price to just a shade under $1,100.

One of the main reasons VR headset sales have failed to impress investors comes down to its high price, prompting consumers to postpone purchases until VR hardware becomes cheaper.

“We’ve always been aggressive in driving VR forward, and today VR and the development community have hit another huge milestone”, said Jason Rubin, vice president of Content at Oculus. Thankfully, it hasn’t taken Oculus long at all to issue a price cut.

Oculus is also selling additional room scale sensors for $59, down from their original price of $79. “This is how the technology business works”, he said.

Vive, PlayStation VR and Rift have been wooing software developers and refining hardware to better entice users. Iribe also noted that there are now more than 100 Touch-enabled games available on Oculus’ online storefront and over 350 Rift-enabled games in total. Oculus showed off a prototype of such a wireless headset in October, but it gave no concrete release date for such a device. SuperData Research estimated that it already sold 243,00 Rift headsets.

Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus in 2014, believing it to be the next major computing platform. It’s safe to say that the company is under a lot of pressure to move as many units into the market as possible.