Since launching in December 2016 the Oculus Touch controllers have become an essential peripheral for any new Rift owner, and Oculus’ latest data proves that.
According to developer relations boss Paul Jastrzebski, nearly everyone who has bought a Rift since the price drop in March has purchased a pair of Touch controllers to go along with it. “We’re seeing very, very high attach rates,” he said at last week’s Digital Dragons event, as reported by Destructoid. “That’s partly why we wanted to drop the price point. We realise that at $200, it was still a little high for it. So we drop the price to $99 and I think we’ve found a very close 1:1. Close to that.”
It wasn’t made clear what Touch’s attach rate for existing Rift owners was.
Oculus dropped the price of both Touch and the Rift at GDC 2017 back at the beginning of March, bringing the total of both to $598. That’s just under the price of the Rift itself when it first launched, and increases the gap between the headset and its main rival, the HTC Vive, which is available for $799 and includes two controllers and two sensors for room scale tracking. Rift and Touch also includes two sensors but a third is recommended for room scale.
Though there are still plenty of experiences that support the traditional Xbox gamepad that comes with the Rift, many of the platform’s biggest releases in 2017 have been exclusive to Touch. Oculus Studios titles like Robo Recall and Wilson’s Heart, for example, can only be played with the controllers, as can recent big third-party releases like Star Trek: Bridge Crew.
Touch’s success will no doubt continue to make it the focus for much Rift development going forward.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify the nearly 1:1 attach rate for Touch controllers to the Rift was for those purchased after the Rift price drop in March 2017.
