Nearly past early adopters phase?

[Mr_Sukebe]

Marketing uses the term "early adopters" for those happy to pay for leading edge technology.

Anyone think we might have nearly passed that phase already?
Clearly we've seen the second hand units being sold for ridiculous prices on Ebay, due to unavailability of units.

Steam have stated that they can now supply within 3 days and OCUK that they recently received 500 units of the Vive.
Sounds to me that this has just killed the "opportunist" market for overpriced units on Ebay. A good thing IMO.

The question next is when are manufacturers going to start thinking that their production is outstripping demand, due to either unexpected lower sales or competition in the marketplace. Once that happens, the initial prices are almost certainly doing to drop.

So, any predictions? Will Steam have enough to put in some discounts during their summer sale, or will we need to wait for Sony to bring their answer out?

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

Maybe I should have made this a poll as to when we think the price will drop.
My personal opinion is that we're being charged "entry" rates. See the Sony VR for a comparison. Planned to be massively cheaper.
Now I know that it's not quite as good from a technical viewpoint. However, just consider how much of a product is made up of:
- The packaging
- Distribution
- Marketing
- Margins to cover things like warranty/fault issues
- Recovering development costs
etc

The reality of most "techie" products are that the physical costs are a pretty low %. So you can probably say with reasonable certainty that the additional technical complexity of either the Oculus or HTC are nothing like £300-500.

My guess is that we'll see some level of discounting in a couple of months, then a reasonable drop prior to Xmas.