With rather curious timing, a day after Oculus Rift pre-orders became available, Amazon Canada let slip a listing for Sony’s PlayStation VR headset.
As reported by Forbes, on January 7th, one day after Rift pre-orders opened, a PlayStation VR product page popped up on Amazon Canada with a price listed at $1,125.35 CAD, which translates to just about $800 USD.
In a later comment to Forbes, Sony said that “This was an error by Amazon,” and maintains that “we haven’t announced price for PlayStation VR.” Amazon’s PlayStation VR product page remains, though the price has since been removed.
Had this slip up happened at another time, it may have been easier to disregard the price as being entirely too high and thus unlikely to be anything more than a placeholder. Hot off the higher-than-expected $600 price tag for the Oculus Rift, however, $800 no longer seems out of the realm of possibility, especially with Oculus insisting that the Rift is ‘heavily subsidized’.
Timing of the price listing also feels oddly coincidental, though it does seem unlikely that Sony would risk trusting the price to a retailer this early when the company doesn’t plan to sell the headset until Q2 2016.
Last year Sony hinted that their PlayStation VR headset would be priced in line with an entirely new console, rather than a mere add-on to the PlayStation 4.