When Oculus announced that the first consumer edition of the Rift headset would launch at $599 (rather than the $300 to $350 the dev kits cost), many potential consumers and observers experienced some well-justified sticker shock . So when word leaked yesterday that Valve and HTC's Vive VR headset would launch in April at $799 , it was easy to assume that they had just priced themselves out of the market.

But that's probably an overreaction when you consider the potential added value the Vive brings over the Rift. After all, the Vive package comes with two completely trackable handheld controllers as well as the "Lighthouse" laser boxes that help measure the positions of those controllers and the headset itself. It's hard to overstate just how important this kind of built-in hand-tracking is to making a compelling VR experience. Being able to simply reach out and instantly grab something in the virtual world is much more direct and intuitive than fiddling with the kind of controllers that have been designed for 2D monitors.

Oculus hasn't priced out its similar Oculus Touch controllers, which won't launch until the second half of the year, but when you consider that a plain old Xbox One controller routinely retails for $50, it's easy to see the Touch package adding an extra $100 or more to the Rift's price (especially considering that the Touch system requires a second Oculus camera).

And that's not even getting into the room-scale tracking of the Vive, which allows users to get up and roam a space up to 12 feet on a side (Oculus tracking is limited to a much smaller area). It's going to be difficult for developers to port experiences designed for this kind of whole-room scale to other headsets, an edge that could justify the Vive's higher price in the end.

What the market will bear

Of course, we'll have to wait for final, reviewable units (and software) before we can determine whether the Vive is worth the extra cost over the Rift. But there's still the possibility that both Oculus and HTC have miscalculated and are releasing products that are too expensive for the market. Some are suggesting that the headsets are so expensive that they will kill off (or at least dampen) any nascent interest in VR altogether. Spending hundreds of dollars on a high-end gaming monitor that you'll likely use every day is one thing. Spending hundreds of dollars on unproven VR technology (on top of perhaps hundreds more for a high-end PC needed to run them) is another.

For Oculus, at least, the high price doesn't seem to be scaring off potential customers. Company founder Palmer Luckey says Rift preorders are "going much better than I ever could have possibly expected," and units are currently backordered to an expected July ship date, well after the March launch. It's possible that Oculus' expectations and supplies are just incredibly low, of course, but it seems just as likely that pent-up demand for VR is pushing the units just fine so far.

It's important, too, to remember that few observers are expecting VR headsets to be an immediate tech revolution that ends up in every first-world household right out of the gate. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told us point blank back in 2014 that the first consumer Oculus Rift is "not going to be a console-scale market," and that Oculus is aiming to sell "north of a million units"—not exactly iPhone numbers. Even bullish analyst estimates expect only about 5 million Oculus Rift sales in its first year, less than either the PS4 or Xbox One did in their first year on the market (initial forecasts for HTC Vive sales tend to be even lower ).

Looking past the Rift and Vive's Cadillac-level pricing, there are plenty of competitors to fill the gaps at lower points on the VR price/quality continuum. The Gear VR, for example, provides a more-than-adequate entry-level virtual reality experience that now comes free with the purchase of a pricey high-end smartphone you may have been considering anyway.

Sony hasn't announced pricing for its PlayStation VR headset yet, but the company has hinted that it will cost about as much as the PS4 itself. That would probably put the all-in cost for a PlayStation VR system anywhere from $700 to $900 (once you include the console, the PlayStation Move controllers, and a camera to track them), well below the $1,500+ needed to get off the ground for a PC-based VR system. On the extremely low end, Google Cardboard can already convert almost any cell phone into a bare bones VR viewer so cheaply that newspapers can essentially give it away for free.

Those cheaper, "good enough" options might replace some of the demand for the pricier PC-based VR headsets, of course. But if those high-end headsets can survive in an early-adopter, quality-obsessed niche for now, the initial sticker-shock prices could come down incredibly quickly. The first DVD players were over $1,000 in 1997, but by 2000, the technology could be included in Sony's $299 PlayStation 2 for free. What looks unreasonable as an $800 VR headset (on top of a $1,000 PC) today could easily be part of a mass market package in just a few years.

It's a mistake to think that everyone needs to be in the market to spend big bucks on a high-end, PC-tethered virtual reality headset this year for the technology to be a success. The baseline interest among early adopters will determine whether the technology has enough breathing room to develop into a mass market force.