SAN FRANCISCO—The entry price for Oculus' high-end VR hardware just came down significantly. In a presentation at the Epic Games keynote at the Game Developers Conference this morning (and in an accompanying blog post ), Oculus announced that its Rift headset is now available bundled with its hand-tracking Touch controllers for $598, down from the previous $798 MSRP.

Oculus also lowered the price of both pieces of hardware individually. The Rift headset is down from $599 to $499, while the price for a set of two Touch controllers as a standalone accessory is down from $199 to $99. While the bundle comes with two tracking sensors to keep track of the headset and controllers, extra sensors that can help enable room-scale tracking now cost $59, down from $79.

On stage at GDC, Oculus co-founder and PC VR head Brendan Iribe said that the price drop comes thanks to "great volume" for the hardware and work by the operations team to drive down the cost of components. "From the beginning, our goal has been to get the best VR into as many hands as possible," Iribe said. "Lowering the barrier of entry and making it more affordable for everyone to enter the world of VR" is part of that goal. Iribe also noted that there are now more than 100 Touch-enabled games available on Oculus' online storefront and over 350 Rift-enabled games in total.

In a companion post on the Oculus Blog, Head of Content Jason Rubin noted how important bringing down the price of high-end VR is to driving widespread adoption of the technology.

"Console VR is less expensive and currently outselling PC VR, and even less expensive Mobile VR headsets, like our Gear VR device, are outselling Console VR," Rubin notes. "Bringing the higher quality of PC VR toward these lower price points is an obvious win for both consumers and PC VR. This price drop was as inevitable as it is beneficial. This is how the technology business works."

The Oculus hardware price drop comes as the PC hardware needed to run acceptable VR also continues to come down in price. While an Oculus-ready PC bundled with a Rift headset initially started at $1,500 about a year ago, a similar barebones PC-and-Rift bundle was already down to $1,100 as of January . That's partly thanks to the usual reduction of PC parts over time and partly thanks to new rendering techniques that actually lowered the minimum specs for an Oculus-ready PC.

With today's price drop, Rubin notes that the "all-in" price for the Rift, Touch, and a compatible PC is now 30 percent less than it was a year ago. That still doesn't quite match the price of the more-than-adequate VR experience on PlayStation VR , but it's a major step toward making high-end PC VR more affordable.

Listing image by Oculus