Yesterday we mentioned that the pre-order date for HTC’s Virtual Reality headset called the Vive was revealed in an interview, with the date being February 29th. This puts shipping of the headset probably in April, which is what HTC said it was aiming for. We got to spend plenty of time with both the THC Vive and the Oculus Rift last week at CES 2016, and we have plenty of impressions to go over regarding both in another article this week. However, if today’s news is correct, the HTC Vive may have just received a big red mark against it.
The Oculus Rift just started pre-orders last week, costing $599 for anyone wanting to snag one of those headsets. Today information out of Taiwan may have leaked the pricing for HTC’s offering in the Virtual Reality world and if you thought it was going to be competitive with Oculus Rift’s pricing, it definitely won’t be. In fact if this information is true, it just put the HTC Vive way out of reach for a lot of people.
Details that slipped out have the HTC Vive headset priced at $1500. It has already been stated that folks wanting to run a dedicated VR headset will need a pretty beefy home computer in order to achieve the proper 90 FPS that is a minimum requirement to have with a VR headset. So when you have the headset itself priced at what a decent gaming PC costs, that is going to put a lot of people off of the Vive and putting their focus over to competitors.
Like any other type of news such as this, we recommend taking it with a grain of salt since pricing could change drastically by the time February 29th pre-orders go live. However, if it doesn’t change and this information is true, the HTC Vive has a bit of an uphill climb ahead of it.
Website Referenced: Focus Taiwan via Droid-Life
