Out of Pod Experience

Heh... in the eraly 90s my dad bought a 386.
Including cdrom/soundblaster combo, vga card with 1mb vram and upgrade to 8mb ram...
... it was the single most expensive computer ever ...
... summing up to 40k schilling, 3k+ euro.

Are people ovary acting? Yeah.
Do people nowadays have less money than before compared to average living costs? Yeah, that too.

So it's kind of justified to be pissed, otoh prices will drop soon enough.

Please remain calm. It's new to the market. The price will come down. Facebook will eventually want this device to be a ubiquitous as the mobile phone or the Playstation/Xbox. It's a very, very smart move for CCP to be tied to the Rift from its earliest stages and I think it will ensure their future survival (which is good news for EvE players).

I used to analyse media markets as part of my job and I think the Occulus Rift is much more important than that. I posted this on Reddit the other day but I'll post a slightly edited version here for well-informed folk to digest because I honestly believe that CCP tying themselves to VR and Occulus is probably the best decision they will ever make.

Ever wondered why Facebook sank two billion dollars into Occulus? It's because the Occulus Rift is not a games platform. I'm afraid Facebook do not give a flying **** about spaceships games. Period. The Occulus is a 'digital media' platform. It's potentially the way many people will access and consume digital media in the future.

Now you may say I should stop sipping the Kool-Aid and not believe the Zuckerburg hype but think about how you consume digital media at the moment. My guess is that everyone will be using one of four or five ways to access it. You may be using Android (Google), iOS (Apple), Microsoft (Windows/Xbox) or maybe, to a lesser extent, Sony (Playstation). In some cases you will be using their propriety hardware as well (an iPhone or a PS4 for example). Selling a consumer digital content using your propriety hardware and/or using your own propriety operating system is the pinnacle of the digital media market. Only a few have achieved it and no other companies hold the keys to accessing digital media at the moment. Sure, plenty of media companies 'produce' digital content, CCP and Facebook among them, but the majority of us access that content through those four of five mechanisms.

The barrier to entry into that select market is huge and its very, very expensive. Very few companies even have the resources or capabilities to attempt it (look at where Nokia and Blackberry were and see where they are now - they missed the digital media train and now they will never get back on). But that's what Facebook is trying to do. It is trying to create an new hardware/operating system environment through which consumers access digital content. Google and others are trying to do the same even if it is to maintain thier market position. If Occulus fails then Facebook risks becoming a company that produced a social media platform that people used to use once (hello Myspace). But if it succeeds...

This move by Facebook is ground breaking and CCP are at the forefront of it. If it takes off then the sky is the limit, both for Facebook and the companies that are attached to it. That's why its potentially the best thing CCP have done. The price of the Rift will come down. All new hardware sells at a premium. I don't think it will put people off once they see its capabilities and its potential as a digital media platform.

TL:DR Imagine if Eve had come pre-installed on the iPhone when it was first released.

You still need to slot GPU in it you gave 257 for a box.

I will buy it if it turns out to be that I am missing on a best thing ever invented....kinda doubt it.

Build a desktop. Seriously, laptops are locked-down and you cannot upgrade many parts, not to mention that Alienware is massively overpriced anyway. You could build a better system for far less money that could run Oculus.

I remember when flat panel monitors came out. $10,000 for a small one back in the day.
Now the same monitor is better, bigger and $149

Give things time.

a bit like cross platform gaming,look how that went !!

Except no company is developing VR headsets for gaming. Why do you think Google and HTC are developing their own versions? Gaming is just one application for the technology. I mean you could use your smartphone and tablet for gaming and nothing else but that would be a waste of their potential. Game consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox are connected multimedia platforms. Why would VR headsets develop any differently?

Hardly. They sold out every single one of the pre-order headsets within 24 hours. I think it's highly unlikely that they're going to take any kind of financial hit from this.

Well they seem to be selling, shipment dates on orders are now apparently showing in May, so March and April's stock has all be sold out, of course no idea what that actual number is.

$599 USD will be about $900 NZD and that is before tax and shipping, at least the more the date gets pushed back the longer I have to save