“Lowest Cost Possible” For consumer Oculus Rift

In a recent interview with Ars Technica, CEO Brendan Iribe spoke out about Oculus Rift, Facebook and on comments made my Mark Zuckerberg. Not only has he said that the company (Oculus) expects the Rift to sell “north of 1 million units” when released, but that Zuckerberg wants to unit to be as affordable as possible.

While we already know that Facebook has a sizeable war chest in terms of financial backing, their money isn’t expected to have much, if any, impact on the consumer model of the rift or its design, especially since development was already well underway before they signed a massive cheque to buy up the company. The main difference there is that Facebook will be taking a cut from the profits and looking to use the technology to secure other deals with content providers. However, it’s those profit margins that Zuckerberg is least concerned about, stating that he wants to ignore margins wherever possible to drive down the Rift’s costs for consumers, and “I do too” added Iribe.

“at the same time, we were planning to run a business, hopefully a break-even [or] profitable business off of this, not a money-losing business (Oculus). Mark is much more in the mindset of ‘Let’s get this to scale with the best quality product at the lowest cost possible.'”

Let’s be honest, Facebook has a healthy bank ballance already, so it makes sense for them to take a smaller cut on Oculus Rift, at least at first to help the product succeed, rather than push it into the realm of the enthusiast, and ignoring the average consumer by jacking the price up.

With everything from games, to a David Attenborough documentary being made for the Rift, I can’t wait to see the final product. Facebook and Oculus are still elusive about the consumer model release date, only going as far to say they “will be disappointed” if it’s not released by the end of 2015.

Thank you ArsTechnica for providing us with this information.

Images courtesy of ArsTechnica.