Oculus Touch Controllers Release Date & Price Revealed
By Rory Young 07 October 2016
Oculus announces the final price and release date for the Oculus Touch motion controllers, which are available beginning this December within a rather pricey bundle.
Early Oculus Rift VR headset investors have long been awaiting the final release date announcement of the Oculus Touch motion controllers, which has finally occurred during today’s Oculus Connect 3 convention keynote. A pair of Oculus Touch controllers, bundled with a second Oculus sensor camera, will start shipping on December 6. Included with the bundle will be two Oculus Touch exclusive games: The Unspoken and VR Sports Challenge.
Regarding pricing, the Oculus Touch bundle is coming in at the higher end of early speculation. The total cost for the bundle will be $199. With the Oculus Rift VR headset still priced at $599, ordering both will bring the total to near $800. That would be price comparable to the HTC Vive bundle, which includes two motion controllers. It would, except Oculus also announced today that, while room-scale would be supported on the Rift, it would require an extra sensor. Those sensors will also go on sale in December and cost an additional $79.
Oculus Rift pre-orderers may recall that due to the delayed launch of the Oculus Touch controllers, they’d be granted priority status for Touch pre-orders when their release was finally announced. Oculus has stayed true to its word on this. Oculus Touch pre-orders will go live starting October 10. So long as Oculus Rift pre-orderees put in their Touch pre-orders between Oct. 10 and Oct. 27 with the email address of their original order, they’ll have their guaranteed priority status for Touch’s launch.
As promised, Oculus will be treating Touch’s launch like that of an entirely new platform. That means that Touch will launch with a library of over 35 games. Many of those are previously released titles for the HTC Vive which have been ported to support the Oculus Rift and Touch, but at least 20 will be brand new games built for Touch from the ground up. For example the bundled-in title from Insomniac, The Unspoken, Rock Band VR, and the multiplayer FPS Dead & Buried – all from Oculus Studios.
Three new Touch-enabled VR games, each from a major studio, were also announced during the event. The first is 4A Games’ Arktika.1, a survival shooter set in a dystopian future from the developers of Metro 2033. Next is Lone Echo from The Order: 1886 developers Ready at Dawn, which is a zero-gravity first person space saga. Finally there’s Robo Recall from Epic Games, free to play shooter where players mow down waves of rogue robots. No specific release dates were provided for the three games, but expect them in 2017.
Oculus Touch launches December 6, later this year. Priced at $199, the Touch bundle will include both a right-hand and left-hand controller, an additional sensor, as well as a connector for Rock Band VR. Two games will be included with the bundle as well, VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken. Pre-orders for Touch go live on October 10, with Oculus Rift early adopters receiving priority in the queue.
Source: Eurogamer
