While it may be too late to ship that shiny new VR headset to your home in time for Christmas, this may be the last chance to grab an HTC Vive at its Black Friday sale price. To sweeten the deal, HTC is also throwing in a $50 Steam voucher to start the new year off right.

The bundle, which is available on the US-facing Vive site, includes an HTC Vive system with all the standard trappings – Vive headset, 2 basestations, 2 controllers, and a few other bits and bobs – but also comes along with a Deluxe Audio Strap for greater comfort, Fallout 4 VR (2017), a $50 Steam Gift Card, and a free trial to Viveport Subscription. At $600 with free shipping, it’s one of the best deals we’ve seen so far. Outside of the special sale price (while supplies last), the total would normally come to $809.

With the Steam Winter Sale going on until January 4th, that $50 could go pretty far too.

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Neither UK nor Continental European customers will be so lucky though, as both UK and EU-facing sites advertise the Winter Vive Deal for a decidedly less friendly £600/€700. With purchase of a Vive, you can still nab a £50/50€ Steam voucher, Fallout 4 VR, Tilt Brush, and 1 month free Viveport subscription – but sadly no deluxe audio strap.

We’ll have our eyes peeled for the next price drops in VR hardware, so check back soon.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.

  • It’s great to see VR prices going down

  • Andrew Jakobs

    No thanks, at least Oculus made their sale worldwide… Also I think it’s more of a dump before they next iterartion which will include the new basestations (which are not backward compatible with the current headsets/controllers) and might even contain the knuckle controllers (although we haven’t heard about those for a long time)..

    • J.C.

      I’d be surprised if tyeres a new Rift/Vive coming before the end of 2018. There’s been zero mention of it, so unless one or both companies are going to try to sneak theirs out to get a leg up, there will be a LOT of pics/specs showing up ahead of them.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Not a new version, but a new revision, which is practically the same as the current one but with trackers that are compatible with the 2.0 basestations (which are more accurate but not backward compatible with the current headset).

        • mirak

          I doubt it because the new base station are not usefully for home users but more for warehouse use.

          • Edward Morgan

            As I recall, the main purpose of the redesigned base stations is actually cost reduction, which is DIRECTLY beneficial to home users. It seems like the current ones are quite expensive to manufacture.

          • mirak

            I don’t think they are expensive, because Valve said the lighthouse system was cheap for what it does.

            The prices by HTC doesn’t reflect the real price if you compare steam controller price to vive controller price which is 3 times more, you clearly see how it is over priced.

            It think the cost reduction would be mostly noticeable for the producer at large scale but not much for the consumer.

            The advantage of the new lighthouse would be to be able to use more than two lighthouse to track a full housse.

          • Edward Morgan

            Steam controllers SHOULD be cheaper than Vive controllers. One has zero cameras doing image processing on a laser light grid, the other has several.

          • mirak

            There are no cameras on the vive controllers.
            They are just cheap photodiodes.
            The 10 years old wiimote has a real camera and does more complex processing than what the vive controller does.

            Also the steam controller has two haptic touchpads one stick and 13 buttons.
            The vive contrôler has 4 buttons and a touchpad.

    • Edward Morgan

      Well, the summer Oculus sale began as a stock dump too. Get rid of the old packages full of XBox pads by taping them to the side of a Touch box, make Touch a mandatory part of the set going forward.

      It was just so wildly successful they decided to keep doing it after they cleared stock out.

      If HTC is clearing stock, I suspect they’re moving towards making the “deluxe audio strap” the standard instead of a paid addon(as it should be). And either the Vive is a lot more expensive than the Rift, or they just aren’t in any real hurry to get boxes out of the warehouse. (Actually, I’m pretty sure the Vive is a lot more expensive, given they’ve taken a serious beating since summer, and six months later they still haven’t closed that pricing gap.)

      • mirak

        If you look steam hardware survey for headsets you will see that the oculus usage share is decreasing in late November, when windows vr headsets are coming out, and Vive is groing again.
        December will confirm or not this tendency.

        • Edward Morgan

          Windows VR is likely going to be the thing to beat going forward. It is cheap, easier to set up, and aggressively marketed, with an added dollop of blatantly dishonest system requirements to make it look even cheaper. I’m NOT saying it is the best thing ever(in fact, I have significant misgivings), but the best thing is often less successful than the easy thing, and it will take a focused and concerted effort to stop the Microsoft effort from becoming the standard.

          Slight one-month fluctuations aren’t really evidence of a trend, though I don’t doubt a lot of people bought Rifts over the summer sale when they hit the magic price point, and then boxed them back up when they realized they didn’t buy a Holodeck and/or don’t have a spare room to dedicate(I have to move furniture every time).

          December usage patterns are going to be noisy due to christmas, I won’t base any long-term predictions on them unless there are some HUGE movements(and make no mistake, I hope there are).
          That said, Steam also shows a decline in VR overall, which currently consists of less than 0.2 percent of their user base. We are still a very small niche, and there is plenty of room for a huge upset to the status quo as we head towards mainstream.

          All of this doesn’t change the fact that Vive is still expensive enough for people to stop and reconsider, and it really needs to come with the “deluxe” strap as standard equipment.

    • NooYawker

      I wonder if HTC Vive will survive to release next gen hardware. Hopefully we’ll see a much bigger selection from different companies next year.

    • Guest

      Oculus already said no Rift in 2018. I’m sure the same goes for the Vive also. The new basestations and knuckles controllers are for Pimax and/or LG’s new VR system.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        The new basestations will also be for a new revision of the vive, trust me, as the receptors on the headset are backward compatible, but the basestations itself aren’t. And I wonder what’s going on with LG as it’s been very quiet for a long time. Also no word on which basestations will be shipped with the Pimax (could be the older ones, but as I said, the receptors on the headset are BC). And certainly don’t count on the knuckle controllers being shipped with the Pimax or the LG.