Palmer Luckey, the founder of virtual reality company Oculus, has apologised to fans for misleading them over the price of the company’s first consumer headset, the Oculus Rift.
“I handled the messaging poorly,” the 23-year-old inventor wrote during a Reddit AMA on Wednesday. Luckey explained that he had been “frustrated” with media outlets suggesting the headset would cost $1500 last September when he responded to an interviewer’s question about a possible $350 price point by saying, “We’re roughly in that ballpark... but it’s going to cost more than that.”
“My answer was ill-prepared, and mentally, I was contrasting $349 with $1500, not our internal estimate that hovered close to $599,” Luckey wrote in the AMA. “I apologize.”
The Rift’s $599 price tag was revealed on Wednesday when the highly anticipated product was made available for pre-order. The unexpectedly high price inspired immediate criticism from the tech press and disappointment from potential customers.
The headset will also require an expensive, high-powered PC to run VR applications. In February, the company plans to offer a package of Rift headset and compatible PC for $1,499.
Luckey also explained that, while he recognised that the product was expensive, the company was not making a profit on the Rift and was “prioritising quality over cost”.
“We could have released a lower-quality product and saved one or two hundred bucks, but the all-in cost for the average consumer (including PC) would not have budged significantly,” he added.
Oculus has a large fan base on Reddit, where more than 60,000 users subscribe to the r/oculus subreddit and where Luckey is himself a frequent commenter. The 23-year-old inventor jumped the gun on his own question and answer session by commenting on a post comparing the headset’s price to the first generation of the iPhone a few hours before the AMA began.
Luckey also spent much of the day reacting to initial orders on Twitter, where he defended the headset’s price, blamed European taxes for the higher cost of headsets ordered internationally, and remarked upon the popularity of the product.
Luckey was 16 years old when he began experimenting with virtual reality hardware. In 2012, at the age of 19, he co-founded Oculus VR, which raised almost $2.5m through Kickstarter. Two years later, Facebook bought the startup for $2bn. The college dropout is now reported to be worth $700m.
The company plans to begin shipping pre-ordered headsets on March 28.
Luckey’s Reddit AMA in August 2012, during the initial Kickstarter campaign for Oculus Rift, attracted 518 comments, while today’s session saw more than 2000 comments in just the first hour.
In a sign that the young inventor is a quick learner, Luckey declined to offer an approximate price for the company’s forthcoming Touch controllers: “No more ballparks for now. I have learned my lesson”.
