That and i really hope it is as open and upgradeable as the steam deck. Valve bought a lot of my good will with the choices for the deck, i hope they don't meta everything up

Here's the thing the expectation was a lower cost because by selling them lower they could pull people out of the Meta ecosystem and into their own. They could even sell at a loss and rack up cash by getting people to purchase games on their platform, not even specifically VR but regular games because the controllers have the same button layout as an actual console controller.

That of course has changed and now it's well, another Vive, another enthusiast device. Most people won't own it and Steam's share of the VR industry will be mostly untouched as most consumers cannot afford the device.

I mean, it's both, right?

We all agree wages suck shit, but my company bought 64GB of RAM for our laptops last year for about $200 each, and right now that same stuff is, what, $900?

Both things can be true at once.

Have you not been paying attention to the semi-conductor and memory market? Prices are absolutely too high due to AI at this point and is part of the issue of why this and every other thing that uses a electronics is expensive as all heck. There's a reason why my 64 GB of ram I bought for 110 dollars is now 500 bucks.

Wages and taxes are a whole other topic that while also true, is a whole other discussion outside of the release price of a VR headset.

All semiconductors are up because the same fabs make it all.

Further, hardware producers are likely starting to look at the "new normal" of ever-increasing prices as a reason to be extra conservative on pricing, because pricing for this moment sets them up to have to increase the price if costs continue to rise, turning customers off even more.

I suspect it was $500-600.

Because it will take a year and a billion dollars to design, will still cost more than Quest since they won't subsidize it and nobody will buy it?

I presume it's the onboard computer that does the camera processing for tracking, and managing the wireless stream when streaming. They'd need to get a supply of cheaper chips that can still keep up with the processing, alongside less RAM and minimal storage, and develop a cut down system image that cannot run games and only does tracking and streaming. Unless you want a wired steam frame, I guess.

Which is all feasible, but it would take work, and then you'd get to manufacturing another variant, maintaining another version of firmware/software, how many people would go for it. And I have the impression Valve is already having trouble procuring enough hardware as is.

You need the whole setup for streaming. You could maybe save ram ny using 8 gigs instead of 16 but at that point its just better to have one sku. From ltts review it seems like the hardware is used pretty heavily even when streaming the games.

From the dev interviews, Valve people said they originally wanted it to be just a wireless PCVR headset with no standalone. But after giving it a powerful enough chip to handle the tracking, the foveated streaming with low latency, and be responsive enough, they were left with enough power budget to run things locally.

So I guess that answers your question. It just wouldn't be much cheaper anyway.

No one likes the current market conditions, but if they included all the things you are asking for it would have started at $1300 and everyone would be even more upset.