Sony's Playstation Virtual Reality Headset to Arrive in October for $399

Sony said its virtual reality headset, the Playstation VR, will go on sale in October for $399 -- significantly less than the $600 Oculus Rift or the $800 Vive made by HTC and Valve. The lower price further cements a prediction already held by game developers and analysts: While Sony’s rivals have inspired greater excitement, more people will actually buy the Playstation headset, at least in the short term.

With the full details of all the major VR headsets now public, the one major unsettled question is which game will become the first blockbuster hit in virtual reality. There will be more than 50 games that run on Sony's system by the end of the year, the Tokyo-based company said Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It is packaging Playroom VR, which lets people wearing the device interact with others playing through the console on a television, for free with the headset. Electronic Arts is making a version of its Star Wars Battlefront game for the headset, although Sony declined to say whether that game would be among those coming out this year.

With the first sophisticated consumer devices hitting the market this month, 2016 is supposedly the year of virtual reality, and the subject has dominated the gaming conference this week. Still, gaming companies have been trying to tamp down expectations about how quickly virtual reality will go mainstream. Andrew House, chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, declined to discuss the company's sales projections.

"I think this is going to be driven as an enthusiasts' market at first, people who are looking at what is new, and completely different, and what's next, in terms of what a game can be," he said.

Facebook's Oculus Rift headsets will begin shipping to consumers on March 28, marking the beginning of the new commercial era of virtual reality. But the $600 price tag for the device actually significantly understates its cost. Using the headset requires a powerful personal computer, which can cost more than $1,000. There are only about 13 million computers worldwide that have the graphics capabilities needed to run VR, according to Nvidia, the largest maker of computer-graphics chips.