Who is going to pay R15,200 for an HTC Vive? These 15,000 people, for a start

With prices of R9,450 (for the Oculus Rift) and R15,200 (for the HTC Vive), you’d think that the fledgling virtual reality market might battle to find interested parties. However you slice it, that’s a lot of cash to drop on a peripheral when you’re supplying your own hardware. And yet…

And yet, it seems as though people are keen. HTC’s Vive recently went up for pre-order for the princely sum of $799 (or £689, if you’re from a country that actually includes sales tax before you get to a cashier), with delivery expected for these headsets in April this year.  Despite costing the same as about half a gaming PC setup, HTC’s pre-orders seem to be having a good time of it.

According to the company’s Shen Ye, who works on the VR side of things, HTC’s Vive scooped up 15,000 pre-orders in the first ten minutes that it was available.

We know that’s no indicator of eventual sales numbers but they did collect R225 million worth of sales in ten minutes at a price point that was supposed to be prohibitive.Oculus is reporting similar success with their pre-orders, with company founder Palmer Luckey saying last month that “Pre-orders [for the Rift] are going much better than I ever could have possibly expected.”

These are just the high-end solutions. Samsung’s about to flood the market with the Gear VR and Google has our back with Cardboard, so VR’s quite the coming thing. We’ve had a couple of false starts to virtual reality but, based on interest alone, it looks like we’ve got the tech to pull it off this time.

Source: HTC (Twitter)