Oculus Rift team want to release consumer version of the headset for free

There's been an abundance of intriguing news about the tools and applications of VR faceset Oculus Rift . Which is great, if you're an owner of the $300 developer kit. For everyone else, it's like watching the cool kids play with their fancy View-Master , flicking between pictures of dinosaurs, while you're left listlessly browsing a picture book about chaffinches.

"The lower the price point, the wider the audience," Iribe said. "We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We'd love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won't be that in the beginning. We're targeting the $300 price point right now but there's the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies."

"You can imagine if Microsoft and Sony can go out and subsidise consoles because there's enough money to be made on software and other areas, then there's the potential that this, in partnership, could get subsidised. Let's say there was some game you played in VR that everybody loved and everybody played and we made $100 a month – or even $10 a month – at some point the hardware's cheap enough and we're making enough that we could be giving away the headset."

"We're not there yet," he finished, "but we're sitting there thinking all the time, how can we make this free? You want everybody to play it and the cheaper it is, the more people are going to go out and buy it. Today it's a $300 dev kit but we're thinking about how to get it out to as many people as possible."

It's a sensible attitude. Seemingly everyone who tries the Rift comes back with broadly positive stories of exciting tech, slight queasiness and being [censored] out of a [censored] . Which means the biggest hurdle is persuading people that it's not just a rehash of ropey '80s tech. And the best way to do that is getting it out into people's hands and faces.

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.