Oculus Touch almost 1:1 attach rate for new customers

Nearly everyone who’s buying a new Oculus Rift headset is also purchasing its Touch motion controllers, Oculus has revealed.

Speaking at a Digital Dragons presentation in Krakow last week, Oculus’ publishing and developer relations for third party content Paul Jastrzebski told developers that the recent price cuts on both the Rift and Touch controllers is paying off, as almost every new customer is buying both bits of kit at the same time.

"We’re seeing very, very high attach rates," said Jastrzebski. "That’s partly why we wanted to drop the price point. We realize that at $200, it was still a little high for it. So we drop the price to $99 and I think we’ve found a very close 1:1. Close to that."

Jastrzebski was less forthcoming about how many older Rift owners have also since picked up a pair of Touch controllers, but it’s nevertheless a positive sign for anyone developing Touch-enabled titles and experiences.

Indeed, according to Destructoid, a large part of Jaztrzebski’s talk focused on urging developers to develop games for Touch rather than the Xbox One controller which comes bundled with every headset.

MCV recently spoke to Oculus’ VP of content Jason Rubin about the future of the Rift and its performance during its first year on sale, and he told us that a price cut was always part of the plan:

I’ve always said there are two things we need to push VR forward: great content and lower prices,” he explains. With regards to price, we always knew we’d have to take a serious look at the price of our hardware by the end of the first year.

We’ve given hundreds of thousands of demos in retail stores and after every demo we give a survey. We overwhelmingly hear responses along the lines of ‘That was great, I loved it,’ but people who don’t buy Rift after a demo are held up by price. It’s as simple as that.

So we did something about the price. That’s been huge for the Rift. By dropping the price of Rift and Touch, we’re aggressively pushing VR forward: more people will get into VR with lower prices and have more money to spend on the great VR content available, and that helps the entire ecosystem grow."

To find out more about Rubin’s thoughts on VR, as well as see what the teams at HTC Vive and PlayStation VR have to say, read our in-depth interview with all three right here.