VR headsets for free? Oculus Rift CEO hopes so
The CEO of Oculus Rift looks forward to a day when the company's VR headsets are available free of charge.
Oculus Rift, the famously Kickstarted virtual-reality headset, is currently just available as a development kit.
Obviously, the company wants to change that as more and more games get Oculus support.
But CEO Brendan Iribe has bigger hopes than that. Speaking to Edge Magazine during the Develop conference in the UK, Iribe said he hopes that the Rift might one day be free.
Let's say there was some game you played in VR that everybody loved and everybody played and we made US$100 a month — or even US$10 a month — at some point, the hardware's cheap enough and we're making enough that we could be giving away the headset.
The company still needs to refine the business model for the product before this occurs; at the moment, the targeted price is US$300.
But given the broad history of gaming hardware being sold at a reduced price in order to increase the demand for the games — and thus have the software as the key money generator in the equation — it's possible that the Oculus Rift might find a similar model.
We'll get some hands-on time with the most recent generation of the Oculus Rift at the PAX Australia conference this weekend. Look out for our report on this possibly quite dizzying experience.