Making VR more accessible one discount at a time.
On the heels of Oculus dropping the price of their Rift and Touch bundle from $599 to $399 this Summer, HTC Vive is also jumping in with a price reduction of their own.
The HTC Vive is getting a $200 price drop, bringing the VR system down from $799 to $599.
It’s not clear how much Oculus’ price drop for the Rift VR headset played into Vive’s announcement today, but what is clear is that both companies have their eye on making VR more accessible to a mass market.
Oculus’ Summer Sale discount is only a temporary price reduction, while HTC Vive’s $200 price drop is permanent. When the Oculus Rift sale concludes (likely any week now), the Rift will then be sold at a permanent price of $499, making the HTC Vive $100 more than the Rift + Touch bundle going forward.
This is great news for any consumers sitting on the fence, deciding which VR system is right for them. With a shrinking price gap between the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, consumers will look to each system’s growing library of content when making a purchase decision.
On top of the price drop, Vive also announced that purchases will come with a free trial to Viveport Subscription (30 days), letting consumers choose up to 5 titles per month to experience. You will also get Google’s Tilt Brush, Everest VR, and Richie’s Plank Experience for free.
With the Vive likely to receive increased attention from the price drop, the timing is just right for HTC leading into the holiday season. “We believe that this is going to be a game changer for the coming Holiday season, that everyone who’s ever been thinking about VR or heard about VR, now can have great titles and technology at a very affordable price,” said Rikard Steiber, President Viveport and SVP virtual reality at Vive in a phone interview with VRScout.
Vive offers room-scale VR out of a single box, with the base Vive package coming with everything you need for a quick room-scale VR set-up: 2 base stations for tracking, 2 motion controllers and the Vive headset.
Although the system is more affordable at $599, it’s still a hefty price tag for many looking to get into VR—but that may be OK. While the Vive falls into a premium VR system category, HTC has plans to reach different consumer segments at a lower price point with new headsets. Announced at Google I/O in May, HTC has partnered up with Google to deliver a standalone headset with inside-out tracking possibly later this year. And the price for that standalone headset will be less than the total of a Vive and PC needed to run the Vive. In some cases as Steiber shared with VRScout, “where you have a high-end mobile phone and HMD, it might even be competitive towards that [price point].”
According to Steam statistics, HTC Vive maintains a 60% share of access to the Steam platform for high-end VR headsets.
Correction: A previous version stated that the Oculus Rift + Touch bundle would have a permanent price of $599 instead of $499 after the company’s sale concludes.
Image Credit: HTC Vive
