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Oculus Rift

This news is going to make a lot of early Oculus backers very, very happy. The company announced at CES 2016 that anyone who paid for an early version of the hardware through Kickstarter will receive the retail version for free. This offer applies merely to backers who pledged coin during the initial Kickstarter run, not anyone who purchased a second-generation dev kit (DK2) or has purchased hardware since the visitor was bought by Facebook.

Eve-Valk

Games similar Eve: Valkyrie wait amazing

This announcement will go a long way towards patching up relationships between the visitor and many of its nearly ardent fans. Back when Oculus announced information technology had been acquired by Facebook, many users were angry and felt they'd spent coin to bring hardware to market, only to wind up fueling a Facebook acquisition. Jokes about how Oculus would soon have mandatory Facebook integration were by and large in jest, only not entirely.

Early on backers will receive the same retail package that's available to order, along with copies of Eve: Valkyrie and Lucky'due south Tale (no relation to CEO Lucky Palmer, that we know of). This move is undoubtedly strategic — information technology ensures that some of VR'due south strongest supporters are guaranteed to receive the game — but it also rewards people who believed in Oculus long before the company had billions in Facebook funding and multiple dev kits under its belt.

Oculus has also announced that it volition open the Rift for pre-orders on Wednesday, January 6 at 8 AM Pacific Fourth dimension (xi AM EST, four PM GMT). Oculus isn't saying when the device will actually ship, and has however to comment on cost. Just before Christmas, Oculus CEO Palmer Lucky tweeted that "VR will become something everyone wants before it becomes something everyone can afford…At that place are a lot of people who await to spend a couple hundred bucks and use their existing low-terminate laptops."

Oculus-Controller

Oculus Touch will ship later in 2016.Gea

Previous comments past Lucky have suggested that Oculus was targeting a price indicate college than its original $350 target, suggesting the device will run at least $380. Oculus has besides delayed aircraft its upcoming Oculus Touch controllers, and will sell these separately from the Rift for an undisclosed price. Oculus Impact is expected to send in the 2nd half of 2016 according to the Oculus blog.

VR is going to be one of the major gaming stories of 2016, but as we've said before, in that location's going to exist a significant adoption curve as game developers experiment with how all-time to tell stories in the new medium. It's not articulate yet which AAA titles will support VR, and information technology wouldn't surprise united states of america if the sleeper hits of the new format are smaller-calibration games or unique titles that serve up bite-sized gameplay extremely well rather than the open-world panorama of an Assassin's Creed or Fallout. Given the frame rate requirements to prevent nausea (90 FPS is considered the minimum), many of these titles wouldn't interpret to VR at all without a significant overhaul and dramatic quality reduction.