Oculus cofounder on not announcing Rift’s price: ‘This is standard practice’

The Consumer Electronics Show is this week, and we’ve already spotted the trend. Surprise — it’s virtual reality!

With multiple companies making VR announcements, it’s not that shocking that Oculus VR — one of the leading companies in the space — plans to kick off preorders for its Rift head-mounted display on Wednesday. But despite that big news, we still don’t know a price. At this point, we likely won’t know how much the exciting VR device will sell for until the preorders go live. While you might think that’s weird, Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey disagrees with you.

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“This is standard practice in the consumer electronics industry,” Luckey wrote in a post on Reddit. “The price is almost always announced alongside preorders. Phones, game consoles — they all do it this way. It is kind of weird to see people thinking it is some kind of special sign about anything!”

And if people aren’t taking it as a sign, they’re using it as an opportunity to make a few guesses. Consumers and industry observers on Reddit and Twitter have spent all of today trying to reason out a potential price. Since no one knows exactly what to expect, estimates range from $350 to $800. And for now, all we have are those guesses.

Back to things we do know: Oculus plans to launch the preorders in 20 countries with “more to follow.” Additionally, the company will not limit presales in any way.

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No chance of Rift preorders "selling out", we will keep taking preorders for as long as people want EVE: Valkyrie!

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) January 4, 2016

Luckey went on to say that if his company does “somehow exhaust all the stock” it’s built up for launch, later preorders will get a later ship date.

Finally, we also know how Oculus plans to justify the Rift’s price. In recent weeks, the company has confirmed that it will ship every one of its headsets with an Xbox One controller as well as the cockpit-simulating space shooter Eve: Valkyrie and the third-person platformer Lucky’s Tale. Let’s find out if that’s enough to convince fans to drop a few Benjamins.