Oculus has announced that the first-party VR game Dead and Buried will come bundled for free with Oculus Touch (for all purchases, not just pre-orders), bringing the Touch bundled content count to three games.
Dead and Buried joins the Touch bundle alongside VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken (the latter two are bundled with pre-orders only), and other content like Oculus Medium and Robo Recall will be free for all users. Extra software like this may make the $200 price of Oculus Touch a more attractive investment for customers who already spent $600 on the headset.
Though unreleased, Dead and Buried has been widely acclaimed, and the value it specifically adds to the Touch prospect may be quite large. The game was developed in-house by Oculus, and has single player, multiplayer, and co-op modes with wild west shootouts as the main theme. It makes sense that Oculus would provide it free since they made it, but also because it would benefit the multiplayer experience in having as many people on as possible, since the overall install base of VR is still relatively small. This logic applies even more to The Unspoken being bundled with pre-orders, as that game is very focused on multiplayer.
While it’s hard to pinpoint what Dead and Buried might have been priced at if it wasn’t bundled, it’s easy to imagine that it could easily rank among the higher priced games in the market. I had a chance to try the latest demos for this game at Oculus Connect 3, and it proved to be one of the most exhilarating experiences at the show. Meeting and high-fiving your partner right before the match where you’re frantically trying to shoot over cover at the enemy team and duck for cover at the same time is one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in VR in general, not to mention working with a team of four to defeat a zombie queen in the newly revealed co-op mode, which I also had the pleasure of trying.
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The decision to make this game free might be even more worthwhile because of how it could provide one of the defining moments of VR for players, letting them see the potential of the technology.
Along with Dead and Buried, all the free bonus content coming to Touch could make the launch of the product one to be very looked forward to, and one that will indulge much playing time before anyone has to worry about buying another game to make the platform worth their while.
