





From the minute you buy most gadgets, you can expect their market value to go down as time and technology quickly make them obsolete. That hasn't been the case with Oculus' second Rift development kit (DK2). Instead, the opposite has happened; on auction sites like eBay, new and used DK2 units routinely resell for hundreds of dollarsthan their original $350 asking price. Unopened DK2 units have sold for as much as $1,200 there in recent days.

Gathering up the data for the most recent successfully completed DK2 eBay auctions (we looked at about 80 new units and 50 used ones, just to keep the data collection manageable) shows just how much of a premium the hardware demands well over a year after it was first made available. The median eBay purchaser has to spend $786 for a new, unused Rift these days or a $565 median for a used unit.

The very cheapest DK2 unit we could find in the last month of eBay sales was a new headset that sold for $375. On the other side, a full ten percent of unused DK2s sold on eBay in the last month have gone for over $1,000, with some reaching prices as high as $1,200 (a 240 percent markup). Those numbers line up with the listings on Amazon's resale marketplace where prices start at $735 for used headsets and $1,279 for new units.

Why have so many people been willing to pay such a premium for the DK2? Well, buying from a reseller is currently the only way to get a DK2. Resale prices for the headset only soared to their current highs since Oculus stopped selling the DK2 hardware on October 26 , likely to prepare for the impending launch of the consumer Rift (which is expected early next year ).

Yet even before the DK2 was discontinued, aftermarket sales were still going for prices well above the "retail" price. In early October, median eBay prices for the DK2 were already at $620 for new units and $524 for used units. A look at the rolling average resale price for new DK2 units (Fig. 3) shows a steady increase starting as soon as the official supply of DK2 units dried up, but that increase was already starting from a position well above Oculus' $350 asking price.

Those inflated prices suggest that there's a lot of excess demand for the DK2 that Oculus was unwilling or unable to fill. While the DK2 is meant for app and game developers to test their software before consumers can buy the Rift, that hasn't stopped many VR early adopters from trying to get their hands on the unfinished hardware. In June, Oculus said it had shipped nearly 119,000 DK2 units worldwide, with the vast majority going to North America and Europe.

There have been many reports that Oculus has had some trouble providing timely hardware shipments of the DK2, especially in the few months after its summer 2014 launch. By the end of October 2014, over three months after the DK2 rollout, 10 percent of outstanding orders were still unfilled. More recently, anecdotal reports from VR aficionados suggest some users have had to wait weeks to get a unit in their hands after ordering directly from Oculus. Order from an eBay reseller, though, and you could be relatively sure the shipment would go out post-haste.

Oculus' geographic shipping restrictions also probably artificially inflated the "unofficial" market for the DK2. Last summer, Oculus suspended direct DK2 sales to China due to what it called "extreme reseller purchases." More recently, the company confirmed that it was only shipping to nine countries in North America, Europe, and East Asia. This likely exacerbated the resale problems Oculus was trying to limit, since interested buyers in other countries are now practically forced to go to resale sites to get access to the dev kit, driving up resale demand and prices (Oculus says it could work with specific developers to get them DK2 access in countries that didn't have direct shipping access).

It's hard to know what the robust market for DK2 hardware says about the prospects for the upcoming consumer version of the Rift. On the one hand, the high prices on sites like eBay suggest there may be some room for a high asking price among Rift's early adopter consumers (Oculus has said the consumer Rift will cost "more than $350"). On the other hand, those high resale prices could be driven by a somewhat artificial scarcity rather than a sustained, deep demand for Oculus' virtual reality hardware (see: the gold rush for hard-to-find retail Nintendo Wii units in 2006 and 2007).

One thing is clear: if you're looking to unload a Rift dev kit before the "real deal" hardware hits, there's definitely a market of interested buyers out there.