Facebook Forcing Low Price on Oculus Rift
Facebook purchase may actually pay off for consumers.
Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset that Facebook bought along with the company that makes it - Oculus VR - is set to follow the Razors and Razorblades route to market.
This model sees the basic unit being sold cheaply because all the margin is made on the add-ons. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says this is what his boss Mark Zuckerberg wants. Iribe says, "I'm hopeful we're not going to be losing money on (the hardware)....
He told Ars Technica, "but I think everybody agrees that if we can do it at cost that would be great for everybody. As Mark says, as you start to get to race to scale there are a lot of opportunities to monetize that are really great for consumers, because they get a really low-cost product."
He then outlines the future, "In the near future, not necessarily the next few months, but a matter of months from now, hopefully—we always say less than two years, some kind of time from here—we're hoping there's a lot more rich, made-for-VR content that gives people things to do."
"As that kind of comes together, we have the hardware in place for consumer V1, and there's a lot of content, and there's a platform and an ecosystem for people to be able to monetize, that will all come together for a consumer V1. There's a lot of rich content being made, but we need a lot more of it."
But this first consumer product pricing and the hoped for sales numbers are, " going to allow us to deliver a much better consumer V2, that's for sure. Hardware-wise, we were pretty locked in already [for Version 1]... but [Facebook] will allow us to make consumer V2 totally incredible."
Source: Ars Technica
This model sees the basic unit being sold cheaply because all the margin is made on the add-ons. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says this is what his boss Mark Zuckerberg wants. Iribe says, "I'm hopeful we're not going to be losing money on (the hardware)....
He told Ars Technica, "but I think everybody agrees that if we can do it at cost that would be great for everybody. As Mark says, as you start to get to race to scale there are a lot of opportunities to monetize that are really great for consumers, because they get a really low-cost product."
He then outlines the future, "In the near future, not necessarily the next few months, but a matter of months from now, hopefully—we always say less than two years, some kind of time from here—we're hoping there's a lot more rich, made-for-VR content that gives people things to do."
"As that kind of comes together, we have the hardware in place for consumer V1, and there's a lot of content, and there's a platform and an ecosystem for people to be able to monetize, that will all come together for a consumer V1. There's a lot of rich content being made, but we need a lot more of it."
But this first consumer product pricing and the hoped for sales numbers are, " going to allow us to deliver a much better consumer V2, that's for sure. Hardware-wise, we were pretty locked in already [for Version 1]... but [Facebook] will allow us to make consumer V2 totally incredible."
Source: Ars Technica
Companies:
Oculus VR
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