The HTC Vive just had a price cut, VR just became a little more accessible

QuoteHas this price cut made you more likely to buy one

Nope. :P

Still can't see VR taking off. The PS4 variant's "only" ~£340, and that's still too much to pay for such gimmicky tech in my opinion.

Waiting for second generation, price drop to 500€ and at least few good games to play around in Linux. Not having time for VR isolation anyway :)

HTC is very silent about next gen though. However price drop might indicate their moves to show or at least drop info about next gen soon enough.

When the Rift project begin, the target price was 300 US dollars. I made plans to buy it as soon as possible. Then it was 350, witch cool me down but still wanted to buy it. And then the thing jumped to 600 and I give it up.

Since I live in Brazil, to import the thing I have to pay 60 % (!!!) in taxes over its price and shipping. Yeah, it is that expensive to import things over 100 US dollars here in Brazil.

So, unless those things start to be priced around 300, I'm not buying anything. I still want it badly, but I cannot justify paying that high just to play my simulators.


Last edited by M@GOid on 21 August 2017 at 1:34 pm UTC

Nope, still way too expensive for me.

I'll buy it in a heartbeat as SOON as the Linux support is stable and there's at least a few interesting games to play on it (haven't looked too much into the latter yet, maybe there already are).

But no stable Tux, no hard bux.

Lack of pricing policy from Valve shows again.

Also, mainland Europe gets shafted a bit. 600 USD is 509 EUR. Even adding VAT would bring it just over 600 EUR.

There are two major trade fairs in Germany this week and the next: Gamescom will start on Wednesday and the IFA consumer electronics unlimited will follow suit Friday next week. Both have been used to introduce new hardware in the past, so I call it likely we will see some announcements soon.

I'd be willing to shell out 700€ once the support for Linux leaves its infancy. That said, I also bought a Wii U for example and only played 3 games on it, so I might be easy to win over :)

Quoting: GoboThere are two major trade fairs in Germany this week and the next: Gamescom will start on Wednesday and the IFA consumer electronics unlimited will follow suit Friday next week. Both have been used to introduce new hardware in the past, so I call it likely we will see some announcements soon.

I'd be willing to shell out 700€ once the support for Linux leaves its infancy. That said, I also bought a Wii U for example and only played 3 games on it, so I might be easy to win over :)

I bought the original Wii & ended up only playing a single game, the ten pin bowling that came free with the machine.

Quoting: WorMzy

QuoteHas this price cut made you more likely to buy one

Nope. :P

Still can't see VR taking off. The PS4 variant's "only" ~£340, and that's still too much to pay for such gimmicky tech in my opinion.

I think it's far from gimmicky but if you're a really active gamer the content can still be a little limited (even on Windows). The tech itself has a fairly wide variety of uses. Not just your traditional gaming but fitness, meditation/relaxation, new kinds of cinematic experiences, social... What it adds to even just the gaming is not some one-time trick as far as I'm concerned. Being able to look around and interact with the game world with your own hands that are perfectly tracked (as opposed to the hopelessly inaccurate Wii-style motion controllers) is a very powerful interface.

Personally I had pretty much stopped playing games because I no longer found them all that interesting and then came along VR. For me it's been a revelation. I do admit it may not be for everyone but that doesn't mean it's a gimmick either. The recent Oculus price drop has sold a lot of headsets so I wouldn't be so sure about it not catching on either.

Quoting: M@GOidWhen the Rift project begin, the target price was 300 US dollars. I made plans to buy it as soon as possible. Then it was 350, witch cool me down but still wanted to buy it. And then the thing jumped to 600 and I give it up.

Since I live in Brazil, to import the thing I have to pay 60 % (!!!) in taxes over its price and shipping. Yeah, it is that expensive to import things over 100 US dollars here in Brazil.

So, unless those things start to be priced around 300, I'm not buying anything. I still want it badly, but I cannot justify paying that high just to play my simulators.

More or less the same reason why I haven't bought a Steam Controller yet.

As someone who doesn't use windows I can not recommend buying a Vive or any VR headset unless you want to be hacking on

• open drivers like OpenHMD


• open libraries and engine integration like OSVR/OSVR-Unreal/OSVR-Unity


• native OpenVR projects like Doom 3 BFG, Vivecraft, High Fidelity, ...

More than six months after Unity had an experimental OpenVR linux beta, which they quickly removed from their releases, they STILL don't have OpenVR support on Linux.
OpenVR support in Unreal Engine should work on Linux, but I still don't know a single application making use of it.

Unfortunately nobody cares about OpenVR on Linux. Even Mozilla (!) is all about supporting proprietary platforms with WebVR and as far as I can tell has not lifted a finger to make it work on Linux in the 6 months steamvr for linux has been available. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310663
High Fidelity is another such project which touts open source and cross platform values, yet it looks like nobody has even looked at Linux support for their OpenVR plugin. After an unrelated GPU hang issue I had with it was finally solved I got to do some tinkering and after just a couple of hours with minimal experience with it, I got it working (including investigating and filing a mesa bug and getting a patch soon after): https://github.com/highfidelity/hifi/issues/10098#issuecomment-323547377

The sad truth is, until there is a complete (unity, unreal) and proven ecosystem, pretty much nobody will care to make their VR application work on linux.

As neither the Oculus nor the Vive supported Linux at the time, I bought the PSVR. I still say, VR is gorgeous and has huge potential (even excluding games) IMHO.

That said, as much as I'd LOVE to get a Vive, it's just still too much! My PSVR sits on a shelf more often than I'd like as it is, I don't need two VR sets doing this... though... I do like playing with WebVR, soooo... *ponders*

Once X-Plane supports it, I'll have a look again. But I might wait for the next gen.

With the Vive you also need a GTX 1060, that's a total of 1000€ (the price of my whole rig).
Add the fact that I am not interested, and it's a no go.
So, not for me.

Quoting: mike44Once X-Plane supports it, I'll have a look again. But I might wait for the next gen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/6oalkh/xplane_11_vr_vive_rift_native_support_coming_this/

But there's a good chance it won't support OpenVR on Linux and you won't have to spend money.

There are already a couple of games with VR support that never bothered with linux.

Alien Isolation had short lived experimental Oculus Rift DK2 support, but never in the linux version. There is now an independent mod, but only for the windows version.
Dirt Rally has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
X Rebirth VR is only for Windows.
Serious Sam: The Last Hope is still only for Windows.

There are some open source engines that are in desperate need for some porting
KozGit's doom 3 bfg fork: https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR (there's a fork with fewer features that does compile and work on linux: https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG/)
Penumbra VR doesn't compile because the original engine doesn't compile on modern gcc on linux: http://rly.sexy/penumbra-vr-release/

I'm sure there are lots more but those I remember right now.

Quoting: lucifertdark

Quoting: GoboThere are two major trade fairs in Germany this week and the next: Gamescom will start on Wednesday and the IFA consumer electronics unlimited will follow suit Friday next week. Both have been used to introduce new hardware in the past, so I call it likely we will see some announcements soon.

I'd be willing to shell out 700€ once the support for Linux leaves its infancy. That said, I also bought a Wii U for example and only played 3 games on it, so I might be easy to win over :)

I bought the original Wii & ended up only playing a single game, the ten pin bowling that came free with the machine.

A little off topic but you guys really missed out on some gems for the Wii and WiiU, you can pick up the games really cheap now, too many for me to list individually but you cant go wrong with Nintendos 1st party games. I've just bought a Switch and absolutely love it.


I've still got a bit of an interest in VR, I think it still needs a "must have" game for it to really take off, as far as I've seen all the games so far are experimental and not really that compelling once the wow factor has worn off.

Quoting: haagch

Quoting: mike44Once X-Plane supports it, I'll have a look again. But I might wait for the next gen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/6oalkh/xplane_11_vr_vive_rift_native_support_coming_this/

But there's a good chance it won't support OpenVR on Linux and you won't have to spend money.

There are already a couple of games with VR support that never bothered with linux.

Alien Isolation had short lived experimental Oculus Rift DK2 support, but never in the linux version. There is now an independent mod, but only for the windows version.
Dirt Rally has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
X Rebirth VR is only for Windows.
Serious Sam: The Last Hope is still only for Windows.

There are some open source engines that are in desperate need for some porting
KozGit's doom 3 bfg fork: https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR (there's a fork with fewer features that does compile and work on linux: https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG/)
Penumbra VR doesn't compile because the original engine doesn't compile on modern gcc on linux: http://rly.sexy/penumbra-vr-release/

I'm sure there are lots more but those I remember right now.

For what it's worth they have to actually use Vulkan. It's required for it to broadcast through the Headset.

Serious Sam: The Last Hope is kind of lame. It's a wave shooter. Serious Sam: The First Encounter VR on the otherhand works great on Linux and is a blast (even though I'm stuck on it because it's freaking hard!)
Alice VR is one that I think still needs Vulkan tot work (it loads, just not in the headset).
some of the demos work, like Destinations.

What I think the main issue at this point with it, is that the nvidia driver needs to be certain version so it'll work, and I don't think that many distributions have it packaged yet.

But so far, the Vive seems to work like it should in Arch Linux. Except I haven't tested the bluetooth shutdown of the Lighthouses yet (though I found out the firmware file was missing for the bluetooth that the Vive uses, now it's installed I should test that function.)

VR will make its comeback someday, maybe when a couple of issues get resolved...
-atm its bulky,
-hand controllers feel rather experimental,
-resolution is quite low causing screen door and pixelation,
-tracking requirements need multiple cameras or sensors for a 'glitchy' experience
-needs allot of software smoothing to compensate for hardware limits,
-still priced quite high despite it being quite cheap hardware wise,
-cheap small screen lcd technology is still limited in color/light/response levels

Quoting: TheRiddickVR will make its comeback someday, maybe when a couple of issues get resolved...
-atm its bulky,
-hand controllers feel rather experimental,
-resolution is quite low causing screen door and pixelation,
-tracking requirements need multiple cameras or sensors for a 'glitchy' experience
-needs allot of software smoothing to compensate for hardware limits,
-still priced quite high despite it being quite cheap hardware wise,
-cheap small screen lcd technology is still limited in color/light/response levels

I'll take your points one at a time:
-It's not TERRIBLY bulky, maybe a tad. Though honestly once my face goes in, I don't really notice anything except that I'm not in a new universe...
-The Knuckles look quite awesome, but otherwise the motion controllers feel like.. well controllers. I wouldn't really call them experimental, just not a lot you can do with how they're currently designed, though playing gun time games is great.
-Resolution.. quite frankly I only first noticed the screen door effect when I tried watching movies in it. I don't see it at all in most games unless I look really hard, and of course when you watch movies you're staring forward at movement, vs moving your head around and paying attention to the game.
-Tracking works great actually, I think the only time I've had tracking issues at all is when my controller somehow ends up under my table, so of course the tracking goes a little screwy.
-I can agree with software smoothing. But much like resolution, it's still early days, text can be hard to read in it, but most other things look fantastic.
-(only speaking for the Vive here) it's fairly decently made, it's not like some smartphones that cost just as much but will completely shatter on impact with anything because they're made of glass...but for price, it is kind of expensive, especially if you're starting with a laptop and not a gaming rig. Though to be fair I did see a 599 eGPU that you could connect up to a cheaper laptop (assuming it has thunderbolt 3), so you could probably get one for about 800+600+600 for laptop+eGPU+vive, but that's still quite a chunk of change!
-I personally haven't had any issues with the color/light/response on my Vive. Though I do occasionally get the 'god-ray' effect if I'm looking around and see something bright.

Either way, VR isn't making any 'comeback' It's here to stay and is only going to get better. There are a few companies claiming 4k per eye.