This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

Oculus Rift

There'south been expert news on the VR front of late, but precious little of information technology is coming from Oculus. Before this week, Sony announced it was closing on one meg VR headsets sold since the launch late last year. Sony has moved 915,000 VR units to engagement, even though we haven't seen many new VR games launch for the platform (though Resident Evil vii is a notable exception).

Oculus has been busy these last few months bringing its touch controllers to market, working on a new standalone headset that doesn't crave tethering, and working with developers on new Oculus VR-compatible games. Despite the visitor's early position every bit an industry leader, the last year saw much of Oculus' pole position drain away, sapped past launch woes, the lack of touch controllers (which the HTC Vive had), no initial full-room tracking (which again, Vive supported) and consumer blowback over Oculus' employ of DRM. Palmer Luckey himself came under heavy burn for earlier promises to foster an open VR ecosystem followed by attempts to lock content to the Oculus Shop.

Oculus' new VR discounts work as follows: The Rift + Touch controllers are now $598 (down from $798). If you already own a Rift but need Touch on, you lot'll only pay $100 for the hardware, down from the $200 launch price. If y'all're just ownership a Rift, it at present costs $500, down from $600. If you only need an additional Rift sensor, that's just $59.

Oculus

Offering divide cost cuts on individual components encourages users to stack them together for maximum savings, but information technology also makes the entry price of PC VR just a little lower than it used to be. Combine this with some of the $500 PC VR kits we've seen, and the price of a Rift + system is at present just over $1000.

As for how the marketplace is doing, it's easy to see why Facebook is slashing the Rift's price by 25%. Final Oct, nosotros observed the Vive had a decisive market share reward over the Rift, as shown below via the Steam Hardware Survey.

VR-Adoption

First the good news. Both Oculus and HTC grew their businesses by nearly 22% respectively from September 2016 to February 2017. That'south not a bad growth rate over just five months, and while holding less than half a percent of Steam's full install base may non sound impressive, an atrocious lot of people have Steam accounts. Dull and steady growth may non exist equally sexy equally meteoric adoption, but information technology's a much healthier sign for the industry long-term.

The bad news, of grade, is while HTC and Oculus both grew proportionally, they started from very different marketplace positions. Assume, for a moment, that Steam had exactly one million users. In September 2016, that would hateful there were 900 Oculus users and 1900 Vive users. By February, there are 1100 Oculus users and 2300 Vive users.

Both companies grew, merely the absolute difference in their install bases got larger at the aforementioned fourth dimension. In September, that hypothetical gap was 1000 users. In February, it would exist 1200 users. When attempting to bootstrap an entirely new method of playing games, every user counts, and HTC is racking them up faster than Oculus.