Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida Didn’t Expect The Oculus Rift Price To Be So High

I think I can safely that the majority of us were a bit taken aback by the final price for Oculus Rift, when it was announced to be $599. Of course, a few weeks later, HTC and Valve would up the ante with the $799 HTC Vive, but the Oculus Rift’s price was an unexpected shocker to everyone.

Everyone includes Sony too, it seems. In a Polygon feature, Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida confirmed that Sony had not expected the Oculus Rift to be priced this high- the price of the Oculus SDK, as well as multiple comments made by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (and the original proposition of Oculus as ‘VR for the masses) had all contributed to this belief. The high price came as a complete surprise to them.

Which is probably good news for us, as customers. If Sony had been planning to counter Oculus’ $399 pricepoint, then we can probably expect them to have arranged for the PlayStation VR to be priced similarly too.