Andre Yoskowitz
12 Jun 2014 13:51
Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey is sure to have made consumers happy with his latest comments, saying that the company will sell the Rift VR headset at cost, with the company not looking to make a profit on them.
"We're going to be selling it at cost," Luckey said in an interview. "Whatever it costs us to make, that is what we're going to sell it for."
Facebook recently acquired the startup for over $2 billion, ensuring that Oculus has enough funding to survive whether or not they turn a profit or not, ever. "If we were running purely on our own and trying to make money just from hardware, we would need to make enough profit from each unit to pay for running the company for several years, until we launched the next one," said Luckey, clearly happy to have been acquired by the social media behemoth.
Of course, the company has plenty of ways to make money without profiting on the actual hardware. Oculus is likely to obtain licensing fees from game developers, especially for games that can only be played on the VR headset. This would be considered the "console model" currently enjoyed by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
So far, only developer backers on Kickstarter have received any form of the headset, with consumers eagerly awaiting their own. Luckey says there will be game demos by next year's E3, but there is still no time table for an official consumer release.
Source:
Stuff