As Kotaku pointed out today, Luckey did say in 2013 that a $600 Rift would be meaningless to the mainstream audience. True enough, VR is temporarily off the table for a lot of people. But here are some other things that I couldn’t afford at first:
An iPhone (I have now owned three, granted via carrier contracts)
A desktop LCD display in the 90s (I’m not sure how many I’ve gone through today)
An HDTV (What other kind of TV would I have today?)
A 1TB HDD (I think I've had three)
I’d say those things have been successful, and had Apple compromised on the iPhone in that first year, I wonder if it would’ve become such a phenomenon. I’m not defending $600 as an accessible entry point—it’s not—but when I ignore the $350 “ballpark” expectation that was set and wound up two towns away, the price feels reasonable. G-sync and 4K displays can go from $400 to $800 or more—and this is brand new tech with a fancy screen and all sorts of motion detection and latency-reducing R&D. Consumer VR was always going to be a high-ish-end enthusiast product at launch.