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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

This would be great if there was any hope to see a better actor coming in. Currently buying a Quest 2 equivalent from a "good" actor is just thought exercise.

Looking at Vive, they don't seem ready to enter the regular consumer market anytime soon. Google and Samsung threw the towel long ago. I'm not sure Microsoft could be a better actor than Facebook if they wanted to (remember it all came down on us way after the devices were sold).

Then chances are Facebook would also kill any incoming competitor in the egg.

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There is a good guy in the space already it's Valve. The Index was good, and there are rumors that they are developing their own standalone VR headset (search "Deckard") which would theoretically compete directly with Quest 2.

I agree with Valve's position as an alternative...but the Index is priced 10k+ so targeted a completely different public, and Deckard is only rumored as far as I know. We have no idea if/when/how it will be released, or if they'll be able to reach a competitive price.

I wish them to succeed, but wouldn't count on it until we have actual release info.

It actually reminds me that Sony is rumored to release a Playstation VR2, which might be an interesting, though not standalone, as the PSVR 1 was decently good.

Also, I only realized while checking Valve's headset that HTC had a consumer grade headset gone public yesterday, though it doesn't have controllers and its future is a bit murky at this point.

The index is ~1k, I don't know where you got the 10k figure from.

Maybe 1k for the index and 2k for a reasonably high-end desktop, so 3k or 10x the price of a quest. Obviously that's not really a fair comparison for various reasons, though.

For the comparison part, I don’t the index as overpriced or comparable to the Quest, it was more about the market position.

I don’t know if Valve will be able to get down in price. For instance their Steam Deck which is in the 400+$ range for a handheld, when Nintendo went with lower specs but also lower price. Valve doesn’t seem that interested in that strategy.

sorry, was looking at the jpy price, and didn’t remove enough 0.

The rumors say that it will launch with Half-Life 3 pre-installed

> I'm not sure Microsoft could be a better actor than Facebook if they wanted to (remember it all came down on us way after the devices were sold).

Huh?

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