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Facebook co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, speaks at an Oculus developers conference while wearing a virtual reality headset in San Jose, California
Virtually giving them away! The VR gaming specialist Oculus has announced it is to price its Rift headset at just $399, two-thirds of the price the company was charging less than five months ago.
In a blog posting Monday, the company said the new lower price for its immersive headset will be available for a “limited time” as part of a summer sale.
In January the Oculus founder and CEO, Palmer Luckey, said that even at the initial $599 price tag, the Rift headset didn’t offer Oculus a profit.
It is the second price fall conceded by Oculus this year after the package was trimmed to $499 on March 1.
Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus in 2014 and although sales figures have not been released, many analysts believe the headset is lagging behind similar offerings from HTC and Sony.
Facebook chief executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that VR headsets would “become a part of daily life for billions of people.”
However in February this year, Zuckerberg admitted that the company’s virtual reality effort is “not going to be profitable for quite a while”.
The $399 price tag for the Rift now matches the PlayStation VR headset made by Sony. The Vive set, developed by HTC Corp, currently retails at $799.
