Feel like you’ve just been winded after seeing the final price of the Oculus Rift? You’ll want to take a seat then – it isn’t getting cheaper any time soon. In last night’s post-pricing announcement Reddit AMA, Oculus Rift founder and creator Palmer Luckey said there’s almost zero chance of seeing the Rift for a cheaper price until future generations are released.
[A cheaper price is]Very unlikely for the first generation of Rift. A standardized system is in the best interest in developers trying to reach the widest audience, and we cannot significantly reduce the cost without dramatically reducing quality.
Luckey elaborated on how often he expects different generations of the device to be released, likening the gap to being somewhere between a games console and a smartphone.
Somewhere between a console and a mobile phone, much closer to a mobile phone. The PC spec for Rift won’t change during the 1st generation.
Based entirely off of Luckey’s comments, does that mean we should expect to see an ‘Oculus Rift 2’ sometime between 2017 and 2018? Who knows. Virtual reality technology in this form is still very, very young, so new iterations could take longer than expected.
Regardless, unless you’re willing to shell out $599 for Oculus Rift (if you can even secure a pre-order), the only potentially cheaper alternative is PlayStation VR, which is due out this year.