Oculus Rift Pre Orders Are Now Live, Costs $599 / £499

Tuffcub 39 Comments

This is it then, the year of VR has been officially kicked off as pre-orders for Oculus Rift, which is know owned by Facebook, going to live.  The good news is that if you click the pre-order button you are not locked in to buying a unit, money will only be taken from your account when the Rift is shipped.

Now the bad news, it will cost you $599. Cripes.

Ridtprice

That’s before tax as well, add that on, plus a delivery charge and it has reported the final price is $684. The price in the UK is £499 including tax but not shipping, and those in Ireland will pay €699 plus shipping.

The website has crashed, as you would expect, but if you do have lots of cash you can pre-order here.

UPDATE: It appears all of the Q1 stock – which was to be delivered in March has gone within ten minutes. Orders are now showing up as April, whilst the front page list delivery as a vague Q2.

UPDATE 2: These are the official PC specs required for Rift.

  • graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
  • processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  • memory: 8GB+ RAM
  • output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
  • input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
  • operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
Tags:

Related stories from TSA

Facebook buys The Order: 1886 developer Ready At Dawn
Solaris Offworld Combat coming to Oculus and PSVR this summer
These 10 minutes of Half-Life: Alyx gameplay look absolutely brilliant
Facebook add Sanzaru Games to Oculus Studios

39 Comments

  1. I wasn’t interested before but that price… oh dear god! hahaha. :D

    • It’s mad isn’t it! Haven’t they heard of a loss leader? I’m amazed Facebook thought that price was a good idea, those greedy boardroom types must be too busy wiping their arses with fifties to notice the rest of us laughing and booking a family holiday with our £500 instead. You can’t get a tan with VR.

      • How would a loss leader work in this situation? They’re not selling games themselves, at least I don’t think so?

      • Since its Facebook I’d assume they’re gonna try to push the device on all sorts of industries, science, medicine, surveying. Selling at a loss to retail customers for games and social use could lead to a huge uptake and plenty of interest from individual and university app developers. Apps get made for fun, apps get made for industry, Facebook sell big numbers, VR takes off, then they make billions in the third and forth year instead of millions in the second? Sounds like good arm-chair Dragons Den bullshit, right?

      • And somewhere in there Facebook make very expensive tailored VR kits for BP and Exxon, presumably.

    • Yup.
      That sums up me too.
      Shame as was really tempted to give it a go too!

    • Seeing the reactions on here and on Twitter I feel like I must be missing something. Did anyone expect anything other than a hefty £400-500 price tag? VR kits in general are pretty sophisticated, and I can’t imagine them going out to a large majority of gamers so they have to price it decently to avoid incurring unreasonable losses. IO’d have been surprised if it was in the £299-349 range for sure.

      • I think most people hoped that it would be under the £300 barrier but there we go. :D

  2. A LOT more than I was expecting, I hope Sony’s PSVR is considerably cheaper.

    • Also be nice if sonys shipped without the poor framerate that causes severe motion sickness that facebookVR appears to differ from.

  3. Wooft, that is a hell of a lot more expensive than I’d anticipated. If the other two come in roughly at the same price, VR could be killed off before it has even started.

  4. A lot of money. Wow.

  5. *falls off chair laughing*…………………………………………………….
    *Still laughing*

    • Be careful the wind doesn’t change direction! You’ll be stuck like that forever, long after the VR fad has passed.

    • Is this you, Del?

      • O-M-G you were there…. why didn’t you say hello? Or even help me get up on my feet :'(
        lol

      • Too busy laughing at you. :-P

      • Figures…..

  6. Bit cheeky beings the DK2 was only $350.
    Suppose at least £40 of that is Xbox controller.
    Much prefer using the Dualshock 4 myself.

  7. better limit myself to just two then. ^_^

  8. No interest from me really, regardless of price. I imagine – the PS VR anyway – will end up left to die like the Vita, when only a small minority adopt it.

  9. Cripes – although it doesn’t seem to have quashed enthusiasm for the first batch. I’m wondering now if Sony will see that and not worry so much about the PSVR launch price. I’m still expecting PSVR to be cheaper, just not as much as i previously thought, maybe only £/$/€100 less than O.R.

    • Yeah this good news for Sony. They can charge £400 now, now problem. I would expect them to keep it as low as possible though, something Oculus are not bothered about.

      • Why anyone would want a VR headset from Facebook is beyond comprehension. At least Sony have game studios to support it.

        It’s quite obvious which is going to fall by the wayside.

      • Facebook also have game studios that are willing to develop games for OR. I think, there was HF2 that was developed or at least, a small demo of what HL2 would be like on VR for OR was developed and i think, FB is merely backing it. They may use their power to support their own games but if they want to not be laughed out of the market, they will be focusing on other studios.

        I am suddenly reminded of a nortious game company. ZYnga, i think it is. Odd.

      • The thing about Oculus is that it’s on PC.

        People mod games and suddenly they can use Oculus Rift with those games which don’t support it. Even if it flops you know a dedicated few fans will keep enabling games to support it in some way.

        If VR flops on PlayStation and the headset isn’t compatible with PC, we’ll be stuck with an expensive paperweight.

      • Hopefully, we’ll avoid another Kinect. Hardware had a lot of potential, just poorly used and needed much better software.

        Actually, what happened with the PS Move? Just remembered that it existed.

      • @colmshan1990

        End users can’t mod games. For VR you need to be rendering at 120FPS that is something the game engine needs to handle.

      • “End users can’t mod games” errr who’s gonna tell him?

      • “End users can’t mod games”

        *looks at Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Dragon Ago, KOTR and generally the entire platform*

        There will always be mods even if a company goes out of their way to be utter bleeps about it. Chances are, we will see a fair amount of mods for OR and fan ports to it.

  10. Bargain! I’ll have 6, 1 for each of the family!

    • The royal family I presume? Busted you, Prince Phillip!

      • I’m hoping that when I give it the royal seal of approval I’ll get them for free ;)

      • Virtual Royality! Hohoho.

      • We all know why Phillip brought them.

        Sadly, Dead or Alive isn’t being ported over. :(

Comments are now closed for this post.