Zuckerberg gots ta get PAID bitches!
This is a surprise how? Of course they were going to do it! Can’t have you jumping ship until after the initial costs are taken care of!
It’s just like new medications. Jack up the price to cover the R&D and then once that is handled, the cost drops to a reasonable amount.
“This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”
If you don’t like people gaming your systems, don’t design systems.
New hack to get around the unhack in 3…2…1…
HAAAAA. Nice one!
You forgot your tag. I’m assuming, but right?
Lol, no. More like “Jack up the price to establish a market price, and if you’re lucky it will stay there forever; when costs go down, pocket the difference, at least until competition heats up – which might happen only after the patent expires, in 20 years. If it’s really successful though, you can just make slight variations and re-patent…”
Costs have NOTHING to do with modern market prices. NOTHING. A price is what the market (== consumers) will bear.
Yes, I am ashamed.
On the other hand, Valve’s VR apps are designed to work with Oculus as well as their own headset. So this is by no means a given.
They’re ultimately shooting themselves in the foot - this just fragments an already small market, making it difficult to impossible to actually make money developing for VR.
You totally did it again! 
The Zuckerpunch. You know to expect it by now, but the exact details and timing are always left as a painful surprise.
I expected more from a company owned by renowned ethics champion Facebook
/s
Well, except the reasons that prices drop on consumer goods like TVs, computers, and toys like this is because the primary market - the people with the $$$ and leisure time to enjoy them become saturated. You drop prices when you want a larger market than the luxury market. I think the time to dropping from the luxury to the wider general consumer market has probably shrunk quite a bit in recent years. Think about how quickly (compared to say 30 years ago and things like flat screen TVs or satelite dishes back then) cell phones and especially smart phones have become incredibly common, not just among the upper classes, but across social classes. They actively seek out the lower ends of the market now in order to recoup costs and make a profit.
You’d be surprised; a lot of Rift owners and would-be owners see owning a Rift as “best of both worlds”, ignoring the tragedy of the commons part where the only reason they’ll have that locked down platform in the future is because they support it by buying it in the first place (see consoles where people get excited about exclusives).
The problem is that people have already bought a variety of headsets, fragmenting an already quite small market which, even as a whole, isn’t big enough to support the software that’s being made for it. So the fragmented market really can’t support software development. Console exclusives work because either a) the console maker is fully paying for development such that it doesn’t matter if it’s impossible to recover costs via sales (e.g. Shenmue), or b) the market for each console is more than big enough to guarantee a safe, sustainable number of sales. Neither is true of the VR headset market. Without the money to develop compelling experiences, VR fails to become a viable platform. Interoperability is kind of key for the future of VR right now.
Unlike Oculus.
Oculus is doing this; in fact, they tried to defend the practice by claiming that their funding is the only reason the games they’ve made exclusive made it to market at all.
Not everything that appears in their market was funded by them (and given the amounts of money they were giving out, I doubt anything was fully funded by their investment), but everything that shows up in their market doesn’t work with competing headsets. So their justification doesn’t really fly. Especially since they’ve had a variety of excuses.
Sigh, preorder cancelled. I was looking forward to the Rift. Perhaps a Vive is in my future instead.
