I've had a browser tab open since Wednesday morning that just says "Rift" in the title bar, and I still haven't closed it. Oculus finally opened preorders for the actual consumer Rift headset this week, and I sat there refreshing at 8am Pacific like it was concert tickets, only to get hit with the number: $599.
I backed the original Kickstarter back in 2012, fifteen bucks for whatever the lowest fan tier was, mostly just to say I was in on it early. I never sprung for the actual dev kit hardware, just wanted the good feeling of having backed something before it was cool. But I've followed this thing since it was two guys and a hot-glued phone screen strapped to some plastic, and I remember Palmer Luckey saying, pretty explicitly, back when this was all still a dream, that he wanted the consumer version to land "as close to $350 as possible." That number stuck in my head for three years. So watching the actual price come in at nearly double that stings in a way that's hard to explain to someone who wasn't paying attention the whole time.
And $599 doesn't even get you into a room where the thing works. You still need a computer that can drive it, and the recommended specs Oculus has posted aren't a "whatever GPU you've got lying around" situation. They want something in the GTX 970 class or better, a recent i5, 8 gigs of RAM. If you're not already a PC gaming person with a rig built in the last year or two, you're looking at spending another six or seven hundred dollars just to have a machine that can run the headset you just paid six hundred dollars for. Call it the Rift tax.
None of this is really a surprise. Anyone who's been watching this space for a while saw the Gear VR, the Samsung phone-based one Oculus helped build, come out at a much friendlier $99 and figured that was the "let people try it" tier while the real standalone hardware would cost real money. Good lenses, good tracking, a whole custom sensor setup that has to sit on your desk and watch you move, none of that is cheap to build or ship. I'm not saying Oculus priced it wrong from a business standpoint. I'm saying it doesn't feel like the thing that was promised to the people who backed it early, and that's a distinction worth sitting with instead of just waving off.
Shipping is supposedly starting March 28th, and from what I've read the preorder page basically fell over for a stretch Wednesday morning under the load, which, fine, that happens when a few hundred thousand people hit refresh at the same time. It's also apparently already selling out its earliest shipping windows, so if you order today you might not actually have a headset in hand until summer. All of this is landing in the same week as CES down in Vegas, so every gadget blog on the planet currently has something like four hundred VR headlines up, and honestly it's gotten a little exhausting trying to sort the actual news from the trade-show fog. HTC's got their own headset in the pipeline too, and from the demo writeups people have posted this week it sounds like the two companies are pushing each other in genuinely useful directions, which is probably the best possible outcome of two well-funded outfits racing toward the same idea at the same time.
I haven't ordered one. Not yet. Partly the money, partly that my desktop is old enough I'd need to upgrade it regardless, and partly, if I'm honest, a little bit of stubbornness about that "as close to $350 as possible" line still bugging me three years on. I'll probably cave eventually, once the reviews are in and my curiosity wins the argument with my wallet. But I wanted to get this down now, this week, while the sticker shock is still fresh, because six months from now when everyone's calmly reviewing their units, I guarantee nobody's going to remember how loud the reaction to that price tag actually was on day one.