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PlayStation VR Pre-Orders Sell Out In Minutes At Amazon (roadtovr.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Once seen as the underdog, Sony's PlayStation VR headset continues to hold its own against PC-based competitors Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The company announced last week that they won't ship the PSVR headset until October, but they also announced an attractive $399 price compared to the Rift at $599 and Vive at $799. And it appears the company's existing addressable market of 36 million PS4 owners are ready to get on board; Amazon U.S. opened pre-orders for the PSVR Launch Bundle this morning and sold out of its stock allocation in less than 10 minutes. Walmart befell the same fate quickly thereafter, though several other retailers in the U.S. are still showing pre-order stock.
1. it's not a product that exists and is available on the market yet. no matter how knowledgeable and generally all-round wonderful your brother is, he tested a carefully tuned demonstration model prototype. So did the journos and other developers at the conference. There's no way of knowing whether the actual released product will be the same or even similar.
Sony might even have claimed it was the actual finished product or very close to it, but (and this may come as a shock to you) marketing people and product demonstrators sometimes lie. Hardly believable of such fine and ethical professions well-known to be devoted to the truth, i know, but it happens.
1a. yes, absolutely. now that YOU'RE saying it, i can rest comfortably in the certain knowledge that your brother is no idiot. I wouldn't trust anyone else's bald assertion, but you're different so i have no choice but to believe you as you command.
2. journalists know what side their bread is buttered on. they also know that "product reviews" are basically advertorials that may generate actual paid advertising for their publication (or may even be part of a deal - so many words of advertorial to get the paid ad). They are also not generally required to pay for the products they review with their own personal money. their employers' money or a free gift doesn't cause the same level of scrutiny and critical analysis that spending their own money would.
3. in my experience, journalists rarely know what they're talking about, most can't even get the most basic facts right. that's because they don't care about facts, they're only interested in a "good story" and have a tight deadline, or they have some agenda to push which doesn't fit the facts. Maybe investigative journalists who spend months or years researching a story know their subjects well, but not journalists who spend most of their working lives pumping out advertorial trash and puff pieces.
4. maybe the PSVR does work well. it may be wonderful. it may be complete shite. it'll probably turn out to be somewhere in between, most likely tending towards expensive disappointment with unrealised potential just like all previous "VR" products.
I don't know. Neither do any of the morons pre-paying for it. That's **exactly** my point.
They should at least wait until they can try it in a shop, even if for no other reason than to find out if they're one of the fairly large percentage of people who puke from motion sickness with VR rigs.
5. They're not dumb because they want the 'dream' of VR to be fulfilled.
They're dumb because they are pre-paying 400 dollars for a product that isn't even released yet, that nobody knows anything about.
Hearing rumours and gushing praise of PR demo models don't count as "knowing".
6. who gives a fuck about "helping manufacturers know what demand there is" for an unreleased product? I wouldn't pre-pay even a small company that i liked and personally knew the owner and staff for an off-the-shelf product that doesn't exist yet. bespoke work yes, but not pre-paying for consumer goods. I'm certainly not going to bear the financial risk of a new product for a giant corporation like sony.
Assessing consumer demand is part of what they pay marketing people for. and those marketing people have come up with the brilliant plan of getting idiots to pre-pay for a product that doesn't exist yet. thus neatly pushing their marketing expenses directly onto potential customers.
i say "potential customers" rather than actual customers because these idiots haven't received the product yet.
7. if you're one of the idiots who pre-paid for the not-currently-in-existence PSVR then yes, i am laughing at you. you deserve it.