HTC Discounts Vive by $199 in Belated Attempt to Grow Tiny Install Base

In case you were in the market to get a HTC Vive (which are really cool!) when the price came down, now might be a good time:

HTC is dropping the price of its Vive virtual reality system from $799 to $599 as the Taiwanese tech giant seeks to compete with aggressive price cuts coming from Facebook-owned Oculus and their Rift headset... Though few of the big players are keen to readily admit it, many investors and analysts have been less than thrilled with the pace of headset sales over the past year. The problem really doesn’t seem to be so much the headset price as it is the need to buy a powerful desktop PC which retail for around $700+. 

That last bit of analysis from TechCrunch is halfway accurate but misses a key point:

Yes, Vive sales are slower than most industry experts had predicted (except ahem by some folks), but the price of PC per se is probably not the problem. The Vive is co-developed by Valve, among the most popular publishers of high-end PC games, and the Vive is linked to Steam, the most popular publishing platform for high-end PC games, with well over 125 million users -- nearly all of whom, almost by definition, own high-end PCs. So Vive has already failed to capture the market most likely to have a PC that works with a Vive. Maybe this discount may change things, but seeing as how few Vive owners even use them, I wouldn't advise HTC to expect many more sales. 

Comments

[Mac]

I wouldn't refer to Steam as a high end games outlet, generally it is pushing very low end Indy games, and what was high end 5 years ago, at a discount.