While everyone expected that Facebook will push Oculus in social network direction it appears that Oculus will use the funding it currently have to price the device as low as possible in order to sell as many Oculus Rift VR devices as possible.


In an interview with Ars Technica, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, said that the Oculus Rift will be priced at "the lowest cost possible" and expects that the company will sell just north of 1 million units with first commercial release.

According to the same interview, Iribe noted that Facebook will follow Google's Nexus strategy and is not planning to make much profit with the headset.

"I'm hopeful we're not going to be losing money on [the hardware], but I think everybody agrees that if we can do it at cost that would be great for everybody," Iribe told Ars. "As Mark (Zuckerberg) 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."

Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, confirmed this by saying that "Whatever it costs us to make, that is what we’re going to sell it for. That’s one of the things the Facebook deal has allowed us to do: because we already have these resources behind us, we don’t have to worry about making money from our customers right away."

According to Iribe, the Facebook acquisition will be focused on second generation of Oculus headset. "It is going to allow us to deliver a much better consumer V2, that's for sure," he said.



Source: Arstechnica.com.