Oculus-Ready PC Bundles From ASUS, Alienware, Dell Pre-Sell For $1499 Next Week

Oculus wants to make it easy to get everything you need to dive into virtual reality. Thanks to team-ups with ASUS, Alienware, and Dell, Oculus will open pre-sales of Oculus-ready PC bundles starting at $1499 on February 16th at 8am PST. Buying as a bundle gets people a $100 to $200 discount on the PCs.

Desktop_xps_8900The bundles include an Oculus Rift, a gaming PC powerful enough to run it, motion sensors, an Xbox One controller, remote, and launch games EVE: Valkyrie Founder’s Pack and Lucky’s Tale. They’ll ship April.

This announcement gives us a much clearer idea of how much people will have to pay to actually use the Rift, which sells without a PC for $599. It will be a decidedly high-end product likely to appeal more to hardcore PC and console gamers than casual media enthusiasts.

The price point for the bundles creates a lot of separation from the $99 Samsung Gear VR headset that Oculus helped build, which runs on a Samsung Galaxy phone that costs around $600. That makes the Rift bundle about twice as expensive.

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Consumers can pre-order the bundles from Best Buy, Amazon, and the Microsoft Store starting next week. Anyone who has already pre-ordered a Rift can upgrade to get one of the PCs too and grab the discount using an offer code that will appear next week on their order page. If you’re not sure if your existing PC will run the Rift, you can check this info page or run this downloadable compatibility check tool.

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Now the question will be whether Oculus can find enough people to buy Rifts at this price point to make it worth it for developers to make must-have titles for it. With so many VR headset makers entering the fray over the next year, there will be intense competition between them for games and content from third-party developers.

Whichever can drive the most sales could become the first place devs build for, and Oculus is clearly gunning to become the iOS of VR in that sense.

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