HTC’s Vive Pro Eye headset drops to $799 as lower-end model sells out

HTC’s $999 VR headset Vive Pro Eye has been targeted specifically at enterprises since it debuted last year, augmenting the older Vive Pro model with integrated Tobii eye tracking at a premium. Following a similar January price drop on the Vive Pro, HTC today cut the Vive Pro Eye’s MSRP to $799, effectively enabling customers to purchase the deluxe model at the former price of its predecessor.

The price drop comes at a critical but somewhat confusing time for the Vive family. Late last year, HTC released Vive Cosmos, which has grown into a family of $699 and up headsets differentiated by feature-specific faceplates, while the standard Vive Pro was recently dropped to $599 — low enough to help it completely sell out on HTC’s website. After the price drop and sell-out, customers looking for a Pro option had no option but to spend $400 more for Vive Pro Eye, a premium enterprises might find unjustifiable, and regular users still wouldn’t consider paying.

Now HTC is back to a $200 difference between Vive Pro and Vive Pro Eye models, which might be able to lure some consumers to the $799 model with eye tracking, as well as winning more interest from enterprise customers. The company is also offering a $1,399 “full kit” with controllers and base stations, a $1,599 “Office” bundle including a $200 business service agreement, and a new $2,350 “Office Arena” bundle with two more SteamVR 2.0 base stations and a 20-meter fiber headset cable to enable cabled room-scale use. HTC still sells a 60GHz wireless adapter separately for $300.

While the Eye headset and full kit bundle are available now, the Office and Office Arena bundles will be available in the second quarter of 2020. That’s also when HTC expects to announce additional details for its low-end Cosmos Play headset, and more deluxe Cosmos XR model, neither of which has been priced at this stage. It remains to be seen how many headsets the company will continue to sell this year, as the Vive lineup has kept growing well beyond the scale of any other VR headset maker, and appears set to add one or two augmented reality glasses for smartphones and PCs in the future.