I’m pretty sure they priced it that high on purpose. They only want devs and enthusiastic
early adopters to buy this thing. Since currently it has no use case for the average user. Apple is probably afraid that if people buy it now and then realize that they don’t see any use for VR in their life they will never buy a VR product again and Apple will have lost that customer forever. Apple hasn’t found the killer app for the mainstream use case for this product yet and thus they are putting it in the hands of the third party developers.
We also seen it happening with other headsets. Lots of people bought a Quest 2 during the corona pandemic, which triggered the Zuck to invest heavily in the meta verse, and now they are collecting dust and nobody visits facebook’s meta verse . The average consumer doesn’t want to strap on a clunky headset just for games or porn.
Game subscriptions will never stay as they are right now. Microsoft is basically burning money with GamePass they aren’t making a penny. Currently they are wining and dining the devs with big checks, but once MS has cornered the market they won’t be handing out these big bags of cash anymore. And they will definitely raise their prices. It’s big tech disruption tactics 101. Undercut the competition and go into the red until the competition throws in the towel then lower cost and increase the prices.
Why not use the European system where you have to use a coin to unlock the cart from the stack. People are more likely to return the cart if it costs them money if they don’t and if they still leave the cart out some kid or hobo will return it eventually.