I have mixed feelings about it.Yes the price is high but the same was said about the HTC Vive when it first came out as well as the Oculus Rift. Recall at that time there were no used units to buy, it was full price or nothing and there had been no MSRP price reductions.However, HTC has felt comfortable enough to release a successor with definitive hardware improvements whereas Oculus (the only mainstream competition) has not.It's also worth pointing out that the Vive Pro can work with the old Lighthouse base stations and controllers as well as other companies licensing the underlying hardware for compatible products. This adds flexibility and the possibility of lower priced packages (Vive Pro bundled with older base stations ect).Oculus has some serious obstacles to work around before they can come up with a direct competitor to the Vive Pro which means there is nothing out there to compete with it in its class. The technical choices made with the Oculus will likely result in a technical dead end when they attempt to address 10x10 meter (32'x32') room-scale tracking with what is essentially an optical camera tracking system they have going now.So a part of the reason for the Vive Pro pricing full kit is indeed justified since they are the only show in town. Don't get me wrong, ~€1468, ~$1709 is well beyond what most people would pay. There are some professional uses for the Vive Pro though. Devs will pay that price and perhaps some specialty gaming venues or theme parks.Current Vive owners really only need to buy the new Vive Pro HMD and they are good to go. That is already selling at places like Amazon for ~$798 new (~$638 used). They can sell their current Vive to help offset the price.

Yeah, but the Vive Pro set cost double that of it's predecessor did at the beginning. I remember well of the 850$ price tag it was graved for Rift's 750$. And I'm still not good with it since if I only want an HMD (which I do) I would prefer panoramic VR, you know, two displays, 5120x1600 resolution and stuff like that. 100% double-GPU scaling each GPU rendering one eye's image like it was promised first time 3D displays came into the scene.Of course I wouldn't be able to pay that, but it would be nice at least to see them keeping promises making advancements.I might buy a Rift though, because it's starting to get really cheap and for what I do I don't need much more like an HMD with head-track. That would be fixed character gaming, mean flying, racing and stuff where your brain have something to cling on. No virtual-motion-sickness.

The problem there though is that if you have the original base stations, you almost certainly have the original Vive, and you won't be able to sell it on while keeping the base stations (unless you get lucky selling to someone who has damaged their headset). So there's a false economy there.Yes the Pro is an improvement, but based on everyone who's used one, it's not as much of a leap as the specs might suggest... and as I say, certainly not worth three times the cost of what you can pick up the original used (but good as new) Vive for now.The fact Oculus lags behind somewhat means the Vive can be priced as high as they like, but it's not conducive to VR being adopted on a wider scale, which is what's needed for prices to actually fall in the future! Unless there are some major technological breakthroughs that enable production costs to be slashed in half, all we're going to get otherwise is small incremental improvements at obscene prices every few years, making VR the purview of the rich elite, or worst case, it goes away altogether. I don't think anyone wants either.

All very valid arguments are being made here for sure.



As already suggested though, the Pro may not be intended for mainstream at this juncture but there is a cost saving upgrade path despite that. There is a market for the Pro even at its current price IMO. Currently I see the Pro on Amazon for about ~$1500 USD. Also, as others have suggested the Pro version isn't likely a significant upgrade to current Vive owners despite its specs.



IMO the VR market can handle having a mainstream lower cost product like the Vive and the Oculus while having a pro version like the Vive Pro. This does not kill the market, doom VR or compromise the Pro.



History has shown us that prices will go down and competition helps to expedite this phenomena. No one gets the shiny new powerful stuff for a penny and a promise. That is just not how the industry works. I would love to have a dual GTX 1080 Ti, Titan X, Y, flipp'n Z (up the wazooo) or upcoming GTX 1180 SLI setup for the price of a single GTX 1030 (~$77 USD) but that just doesn't happen with or without crypto mining hijacking the MSRP. I'd also love to have a Core i9 7980XE Skylake X 18 Core processor (almost ~$2000 USD) for mainstream processor prices like ~$300 to ~$400 USD but that isn't going to happen either.



While these analogies may fail in some areas the do not fail with respect to the comparison of the differing intended target markets with respect to the given manufacturer's line of products.



By the time the current pro or something with similar specs become more mainstream the HTC Vive line may have moved the specs higher (larger FOV, higher resolution 4K and so on).



The important thing IMO is to keep the techno lust in check.



I have an Oculus Rift because the price was right. I like it well enough as is but I see where there is room for improvement. A number of the improvement I would like to see simply are not in the Vive Pro even though I believe the Vive Pro to be a better product (Vive too). This will take time and it will take generations of products to be realized / actualized.



People who are VR enthusiasts (myself included) need not put all their eggs in the Vive Pro basket now because it simply isn't the magic bullet that we truly want,.....its just the best on offer currently,....



Emphasis on the word "currently".