As we head toward the release of the Oculus Rift early next year there’s actually a hint at pricing courtesy of Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe.
Now most of you will probably own a fairly decent PC already so this pricing comment from Iribe is not exactly that helpful. According to Iribe, who was speaking at Re/Code in California, a VR setup with an Oculus Rift and a PC capable enough to handle what it needs for solid performance is going to set a PC gamer back around $1500.
We know that that the Oculus Dev kit costs $350 USD and we expect the retail version to come in at least slightly more. That means that if you have a PC worth around $1100 USD then it’s probably going to be just fine.
The pricing comment does indicate that anyone who’s serious about VR is going to have to own a PC that’s fairly decent. If you look at a PC say on Cyberpower (other retailers are available), a Mega Special 2 costs around $1105. The specs of that currently include an Intel Core i5-4690K CPU, a GTX 960 and 8GB RAM. It’s not absolutely top of the range but it looks like it could do.
With the cost of the Rift likely to be above the dev kit pricing due to the addition of new controllers, you get a rough idea on what to expect.
I would still recommend you really hold off on jumping onto the VR train when it starts rolling because it needs to be a lot better (weight-wise in particular) than what we have experienced so far.
