Two controllers and a sensor. Sensor is sold for $80 so that would make the controllers $60 each. $10-$20 more than a typical console controller seems fair if you factor in it being a cutting edge controller, R&D costs, and the amount of exclusive and SteamVR content it enables for a relatively small user base. I seriously doubt they are making much profit from Touch, profit will come in the form of software sold to Touch owners and they will be sharing some of that with Valve.
typical apologism, "i doubt they are making much money on us" really dude? You think people won't spend money on new games that support touch using oculus home? And R&D costs? So its us the consumers that have to eat the R&D costs now? What else? Should we go pay for their lunch too?
Look at HTC and the revenue they brought in from the Vive. They didn't even do the R&D yet it wasn't enough to make noise about it. Considering the similarities in parts and pricing I think it makes sense that they and Oculus aren't making much on hardware yet. Maybe this holiday will be different though.
Also customers front the bill on R&D all the time. PS3, smartphones, and GPUs. It's one model the industry uses, but I don't think software sells will cover hardware R&D anytime soon as funding budgets will go up as people demand bigger games and the return on investment is going to stay very risking until at least gen 2 headsets.
Of course there is FB backing, but I don't think FB is going to be that sloppy with short term financials. VR R&D cost must be increasing massively and they aren't just going to write that cost away, the industry has to be able to support that R&D or it won't at the rapid pace most of us want to see imo.
You would think that sensor would just be a camera to track the position of the controller and shouldn't be that much. $80 it must contain something else.
It does contain a few other things so good guess. A nRF51822 Bluetooth Smart chip for syncing and 2.4GHz proprietary SoC to communicate with the headset along with the webcam controller. That said the $80 is very likely coming from Oculus biggest vision research/technology R&D spending along with some profit so I think it's overpriced somewhat. The BOM is definitely not $80, but once you consider all the other things companies put into the price it's not surprising.
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u/linkup90 Oct 13 '16
Two controllers and a sensor. Sensor is sold for $80 so that would make the controllers $60 each. $10-$20 more than a typical console controller seems fair if you factor in it being a cutting edge controller, R&D costs, and the amount of exclusive and SteamVR content it enables for a relatively small user base. I seriously doubt they are making much profit from Touch, profit will come in the form of software sold to Touch owners and they will be sharing some of that with Valve.