The HTC Vibe will cost almost $1500AU, not including postage, after taxes and currency exchange. I also imagine that shipping will ramp the price right up, and that orders will take 2+ weeks to ship (whereas Oculus units arrive within days).
This is a major problem. HTC/Valve should be encouraging developers to jump on-board with lower priced, stock kits, but they'd rather inflate the price by adding gimmicky, unnecessary toys that all developers already have. Instead of getting developers on-side so that more apps can produced for the hardware, they're going to push developers to go with the long cheaper Oculus (which has been out longer, has cheap resale products and overall has taken a much better approach) or away from VR itself.
I'm currently sticking with Oculus/Cardboard development. I cannot jump onto a ship that's clearly unstable.
Also, for any people arguing that Australia has a higher minimum wage; we also have much higher living expenses and are taxed higher, so in the end it should balance out, but with our dollar plummeting (due to demand in coal, our major export, dropping massively) we're now being given the short end of the stick for the entire video game market.
the final vive isn't exactly made to be a dedicated developer kit - that was the purpose of the vive DK1 and the vive pre. the final vive is a dedicated consumer version and is meant to have "gimmicky toys" come with it (wait, what exactly are you referencing to?).
these are classic australia prices at work. oculus cv1 isn't exactly cheap either: ~$1100AU
if you add touch controllers that you'll have to buy
separately later on, the costs are probably going to be relatively similar. currently it comes bundled with a goddamn xbox controller. like, seriously? wtf. the vive's motion controllers that come with the kit (no need to buy separately) are far better suited for VR
vive also has proper room scale support (while rift's implementation is lacking afaik)
the ship isn't exactly "unstable" considering both headsets are selling EXTREMELY well (as far as i know)
So my GTX 960 4gb is not enough?
depends on the specific games, oculus store and steam's vr titles are guaranteed to work on GTX 970 and up on decent settings and >90FPS, it is up to developers if they want to support lower-end hardware
