Oculus shows how not to do a Black Friday sale

VR is still on the pricey side so maybe you were hoping to grab some hardware and games to play through a Black Friday sale. Unfortunately for you, the Oculus deals are pretty bad. First off, hardware discounts are small, just $50 off an Oculus Rift S or Go.

Second, the sale mostly offers bundles ranging from €200 to €45. The problem with that is that you can’t pick and choose which games you get. For example, one of the pricier bundles, the Black Collection, features Superhot VR (which you probably already have) and Electronauts (which you maybe don’t want).

Even if you could live with a few duplicates and “stocking stuffer” games, the discounts aren’t particularly high – 20% or so. It differs by bundle, the highest discount we found was 40% off for the Rift Platinum Collection (but the game selection in this bundle is questionable).

You can check out the Oculus Black Friday Sale and see if you can find something you like.

Note that there are different bundles for the different headsets. However, thanks to a recent update, the Oculus Quest can stream games from your PC – either wirelessly (at the cost of higher latency) or wired (lower latency, but you need a Link cable).

This means you can just buy PC games from Steam, which has better deals, and play them on the Quest (which normally plays ports). Unfortunately, some games are Oculus-exclusives (e.g. Robo Recall) so you can’t quite make up the same bundles as what the Oculus store offers, but Steam does let you buy games individually.

Even the newly announced Half-Life: Alyx has a slight discount. Just 10% off, but it’s a long way out – it launches in March next year. Also check out the Viveport Black Friday special, which offers 45% off the annual pass for Infinity, a subscription service for VR games.