"I handled the messaging poorly"—Luckey

palmer luckey

Reddit has become the go-to for frank (or at least pseudo-frank) admissions of corporate mess-ups these past few months. Gabe Newell led the apologetic charge amid the unfolding paid mods disaster, and now Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has delivered a substantial AMA explaining why the Rift costs several hundred dollars more than expected, alongside new details.

"I handled the messaging poorly," Luckey says. "Earlier last year, we started officially messaging that the Rift+Recommended spec PC would cost roughly $1500.

"In a September interview, during the Oculus Connect developer conference, I made the infamous 'roughly in that $350 ballpark, but it will cost more than that' quote. As an explanation, not an excuse: during that time, many outlets were repeating the 'Rift is $1500!' line, and I was frustrated by how many people thought that was the price of the headset itself. My answer was ill-prepared, and mentally, I was contrasting $349 with $1500, not our internal estimate that hovered close to $599 - that is why I said it was in roughly the same ballpark."

Eve: Valkyrie will ship with every Oculus Rift.

Eve: Valkyrie will ship with every Oculus Rift

$599—at which price Luckey claims Oculus don't make a profit—is the product of custom OLED displays, motion tracking and advanced optics "that are more complex to manufacture than many high end DSLR lenses."

Other morsels include the estimate that 100 games will be available on Rift by the end of the year, 20 from Oculus Studios, and that you shouldn't expect to be playing on maximum settings with just the recommended hardware. But we are PC gamers, and this is familiar territory.

I'm most surprised by the assertion that Rift games will not be exclusive to the Rift store but made available wherever the developer chooses. That's what we expect of games at present, but who didn't eye the Facebook buyout and imagine a closed platform creeping up on us?

Latest in VR Hardware
A still from a YouTube video showing The Swedish Maker cutting a piece of wood with power tools while wearing a Meta Quest 3 VR headset.
YouTuber The Swedish Maker wears a Meta Quest 3 VR headset for his entire woodworking project and miraculously emerges with all fingers intact
The HTC Vive XR Elite front three quarter angle
Google is bulk buying HTC Vive engineers to help Android XR become a platform that can rival Meta's VR/AR dominance
Meta Horizon OS on a box.
The upcoming Asus VR project is rumoured to have eye and face tracking, yet the thing I'm most excited about is its OS
An image of a Meta Quest 3S VR headset and two hand controllers against a teal background and a white border
Be the Batman in your bedroom with this Meta Quest 3S deal, saving $50 on the 256 GB model
Pimax Dream Air VR headset on a grey background
This upcoming Micro-OLED VR headset has absolutely everything and weighs less than 200 grams but of course it costs nearly 4x the Quest 3
A Meta Quest 3S, alongside a Quest 3 and Quest 2, on a stack of PC Gamer magazine.
Meta could take a step back from designing VR headsets and lend other companies access to its Horizon OS instead
Latest in News
Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect's Jennifer Hale, who played femshep, 'saw no line' before she recorded them for Bioware's flagship trilogy: 'It was all cold reading on the spot'
Microsoft's Task Manager in Windows 11
After years of complaints about Windows Task Manager displaying CPU utilization incorrectly, a fix is finally on its way
Sony RGB LED panel tech
Sony's fixing the wrong panel problems while showing off its new 'RGB LED' backlight tech with outrageous colours and brightness
Super Mario World
Super Nintendo consoles appear to be running ever-so-slightly faster as they age and speedrunning detectives are hot on the case
A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor surrounded by DDR5 memory sticks from Corsair, Kingston, and Lexar
Fresh leak suggests Intel's on-again-off-again Arrow Lake CPU refresh is back on the menu (boys)
A Colorful RTX 5080 and its box
Three lucky folks in India can win the dubious honour of buying an RTX 5080 GPU at Nvidia MSRP