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HTC has been an early entrant into the virtual reality business with its famous Vive VR headsets announced last year. However, one of the major resistance for the HTC Vive VR headsets is its pricing. The $799 pricing behind its VR headset has kept many new entrants and enthusiasts from making a Vive purchase.
Lately, with many tech companies – like Intel, Lenovo and others – joining the VR bandwagon, a lot of players are working towards adding better mobility to VR headsets and making them more affordable. Taking cognisance of this fact of the upcoming competition, HTC has arrived with new financing plans for its Vive VR headset and also subscription plans for its Viveport content. Also, it has officially announced the pricing of its two recently launched Vive accessories – the Vive Tracker and the Deluxe Audio Strip.
Image credit: RoadToVR
HTC Vive Payment Plan
In a bid to increase its existing customer base and encourage more number of VR enthusiasts for buying the Vive headsets, the company has announced new financing plans for customers. As a result, buyers need not pay a huge upfront for the Vive headset and can choose between the available installment plans as per their convenience.
These plans have currently been announced for the U.S. and China markets and come with as low as 0% interest financing schemes. JD.com will be selling the Vive headsets in U.S. under following three plans of monthly installments:
- Monthly $136 for a period of 6 months with 0% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
- Monthly $66.58 for a period of 12 months with 0% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
- Monthly $40.13 for a period of 24 months with 7.99% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
Similarly, in China, the Vive headset will be available in three plans of monthly installments like:
- Monthly ¥2,296 for a period of 6 months with 0% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
- Monthly ¥1,148 for a period of 12 months with 0% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
- Monthly ¥574 for a period of 24 months with 7.99% financing, and including taxes and shipping.
Viveport Content Subscription Plan
Rikard Steiber, HTC’s President for Viveport has just revealed the pricing for the upcoming subscription plan for VR content. The Viveport subscription plan will be available to all the existing and new users “in next few weeks”.
Initially, the existing customers, as well as new owners, will get a free month-long trial immediately after the subscription service is launched. After the end of the free trial period, a subscriptions fee of $6.99 per month will be charged. Steiber said that with this plan, “users will be able to select 5 experiences a month from our pool of Viveport content.” The selected plan can be kept month-to-month and even swapped for new selections.
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The content will be made available by Vive Studios and other Vive Developers. The developers will be paid a price revenue every time their app is selected by users. As per Steiber, this will encourage developers to come up with better and quality content for the Vive users.
Vive Tracker and Deluxe Audio Strap Pricing
At the CES 2017 expo in January 2017, HTC announced two major accessories – The Vive Tracker and Deluxe Audio Strap. However, there were no words regarding the pricing or the release date of these two accessories. Now, HTC has officially put a price of $100 for the Vive Tracker and the Deluxe Audio Strap each.
Image credit: RoadToVR
The HTC Vive Tracker has been fairly priced for an amount of $100 and will be made available to developers from the 27th of March.
The Vive Tracker is a motion sensor that works on HTC’s own lighthouse tracking system. It can be attached to real objects, and take them into your VR Space. HTC has already rolled out 1000 Vive Tracker units to developers for free out of the initial 2300 applications it received. For those who could not get their hands on this device can purchase from their official website after March 27.
The Vive Tracker for general customers won’t be available until this year end. HTC wants to make sure that before making it available to normal customers, they have enough content arsenal with the Vive Tacker, offering multiple options to its customers.
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The Deluxe Audio Strap is an integrated audio headphone to add better sound immersion to your VR experience. Priced at also $100, it will be available for pre-order from 2nd of May along with a purported launch in June.
The Deluxe Audio Strap will be available directly with the purchase of Vive ‘Business Edition’ headset for $1,200. This is nothing but same as the consumer headset, but rather features enterprise focused ordering, warranty and support.
The subscription plan seems to be quite a relief for your wallets… Also, waiting to try the Vive Tracker and Audio Deluxe Strap… Will sone pre-order one as the process begins.
absolutely, this now seems a little better as buying all this stuff together was such a huge pain.