Author: Kyle Orland

DULLES, Va.—Regular watchers of the annual Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) video game speedrun marathon are probably intimately familiar with the power of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot). Two years ago, the emulator-fueled bot used its controller-port interface to write a simple version of Pong and Snake on top of a running Super Mario World cartridge. Last year, TASBot outdid itself by using a copy of Pokemon Red and a Super Game Boy to force a live, IRC-based Twitch chat through an unmodified Super Game Boy.

By now, simply taking over a game and replacing it with a brand new app was beginning to feel a little predictable. So this year, TASBot decided to show off a new skill. At the AGDQ marathon, the bot set out to edit new features onto a game that's still running in active memory. TASBot wanted to be magnanimous with its new capabilities, too, allowing human players (and livestream viewers) the opportunity to edit the game on the fly.

But just how did TASBot—and the team of coders behind it—intend to turn an old game of Super Mario World, running on a standard SNES, into a heavily editable game of Super Mario Maker? Luckily, we had a behind-the-scenes invite to the event and the opportunity to find out.

When Oculus started taking preorders for its Rift headset at $599 on Wednesday, plenty of potential consumers experienced a bit of sticker shock, thanks in part to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey's admittedly poor job of setting price expectations. While VR consumers can wait for the Rift to come down in cost, though, that launch price could have a much more immediate impact on another group: developers.

"I'm expecting a smaller audience than before [the price was revealed], which isn't good news, but it's no catastrophe either," indie VR developer E McNeill (Darknet, Tactera) told Ars in an e-mail interview.

McNeill said he had been expecting a $499 launch price for the Rift and hoped that it would somehow come in lower than that. "I think the low prices of the dev kits ($300 and $350) had anchored my expectations for the final product."

In the never-ending battle between pirates and game makers, it often seems like the pirates have the upper hand, releasing DRM-breaking cracks within hours or days of a game's official release. Now, the founder of a major Chinese piracy group is warning that it is losing the battle against a specific DRM protection scheme, to the point where game piracy may no longer be possible within two years.

TorrentFreak reports on a recent post by Bird Sister, the founder of Chinese cracking message board 3DM forum, that says the recent release of Just Cause 3 has pushed the group's cracking abilities practically past their limits. "The last stage is too difficult and Jun [cracking guy] nearly gave up, but last Wednesday I encouraged him to continue,” she wrote.

"I still believe that this game can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years' time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world," she continued.

With this morning's revelation that the Oculus Rift VR headset would sell for $599, many potential customers and industry observers experienced some sticker shock. Where was the consumer unit "in the ballpark" of the $350 DK2 dev kit that Oculus founder CEO Palmer Luckey talked about as recently as October?

In a Reddit AMA interview tonight, Luckey apologized for that comment and for "assuming we had been clear enough about setting expectations" for the headset's price. "I handled the messaging poorly," Luckey said plainly in the AMA thread.

Defending the company to some extent, Luckey pointed to comments from last May, when Oculus executives started saying that the Oculus Rift and a capable PC would cost $1,500 combined (Oculus will indeed start selling pre-orders for the Rift bundled with "Oculus ready" PCs for that price in February). That should have set accurate expectations for most potential Rift owners, Luckey said. "For that vast majority of people, $1,500 is the all-in cost of owning Rift. The biggest portion of their cost is the PC, not the Rift itself."

Over under on the consumer Rift at launch: $500

— Kyle Orland (@KyleOrl) January 4, 2016

On Monday, when Oculus first announced that it would finally be taking consumer Oculus Rift pre-orders later in the week, I tweeted an over/under prediction that the Rift itself would come in at $500. Nearly 1,000 Twitter poll voters seemed to converge on that same expectation, with almost equal proportions guessing the price would be higher or lower than $500 (and 19 percent thinking the $500 guess was exactly right). It's not a random, scientific sample or anything, but the wisdom of crowd effect suggests $500 was a decent average expectation for the Rift price as of earlier this week (at least among the generally tech-savvy audience that would see my tweet).

Those baseline expectations were extremely important this morning when Oculus announced a $599 price for the first consumer edition of the Oculus Rift. It's not hard to find people online complaining that the price tag is just too much money to pay for an unproven device like the Rift, especially when you consider the added cost of the decently powerful PC needed to use the device. Comparisons to the PS3's famously derided "Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars" announcement are already rampant.

It's also not hard to find early adopters admitting that they're willing to pay the perhaps higher-than-expected price—the ever-receding "expected ship date" on the Oculus Shop page suggests sales are surpassing inventories so far, at least. Everyone's budgetary threshold for VR is going to be different, and there's no reason that the early adopter, day-one price for a new category of consumer hardware should be the same as the eventual "mass market" price brought on by scale and technological advancement.

[Update: More details on ship date, Oculus Ready PCs, and exclusive games are now in the below story]

After dozens of trade-show demos, two publicly available development kits, a $2 billion buyout, and nearly four years of speculation, Oculus has finally locked down the release details for the first consumer version of the Rift virtual reality headset. The $599 VR unit is now available for preorder ahead of expected shipments starting in March (though the shop page had some major loading problems right after pre-orders went live). Oculus says the headset will be available at "limited retail locations" starting in April.

That price will get users the headset, a head-tracking camera, an Xbox One controller, the media-focused "Oculus remote," connection cables, a carrying case, and two included games: space shooter Eve Valkyrie and third-person platform game Lucky's Tale. It does not include tax, roughly $30 in shipping, or the promising Oculus Touch hand-tracking controllers, which were recently delayed to the second half of 2016. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tweeted yesterday that those who preorder the Rift would also be first in line to preorder the Touch controllers later in the year.

2015 was our ninth straight year asking readers to donate to some worthy charities for a chance to win the swag we collected during the year. It was also our most successful charity fundraising year by a good margin.

All told, Ars Technica readers donated a combined $38,861.06 to Child's Play and the EFF as part of the 2015 drive. That absolutely shatters last year's charity take of $25,094.31 and beats the annual record of $28,713.52 set in 2012.

That record wasn't just set by a few extremely rich and generous readers, either. While 2012 saw a couple of $5,000 donations, the top donation this year was $2,500. Instead, we set the new record donation mark by getting 615 people to give whatever they could. That includes over 100 people who were able to give at least $100 each.

With all the recent excitement about upcoming virtual reality headsets, many observers have still worried about a pretty basic problem: the inability to see the world around you when your eyes are encased in a vision-blocking headset. A new prototype of the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive being shown at CES this week aims to solve that problem with a forward-facing camera that can integrate views of your surroundings with virtual reality scenes.

The HTC Vive Pre, the second dev kit offered by the company, will be used by many developers working on software before the planned rollout of the consumer version in April (after a recent delay from "2015"). While the Pre isn't representative of final hardware, it seems much closer to a complete consumer device than the rough prototypes we first saw last March, which featured lots of exposed wiring and clunky design touches.

The biggest new feature on the Pre is the front-facing camera, the main purpose of which seems to be the ability to orient yourself in the real world without having to briefly lift up the headset to have a look around. A hands-on look from The Verge describes how the external real-world view turns on automatically when you reach the edge of the system's tracking volume, offering a faint black-and-teal view of your surroundings that lets you see objects and patterns like walls. You can replace the VR world with a full view of your surroundings in "chaperone mode."

More than 7,500 early adopters who provided the initial funding for the Oculus Rift VR headset through its original Kickstarter will get a free unit of the Rift's upcoming first consumer edition, the company announced today.

Everyone who pledged at least $275 to get the first Rift Developer Kit during Oculus' August 2012 Kickstarter will soon be e-mailed a form asking for their shipping address. Oculus will ship the free "Kickstarter Edition" headsets to any of the 20 countries the Rift is launching in, and it is working on alternative shipment methods for backers in other countries.

The free headset offer does not apply to those who bought the second Rift Development Kit directly from Oculus last year. People who backed the Kickstarter at smaller levels (receiving backer bonuses like stickers and t-shirts) will not be eligible for the free consumer Rift, either.

Oculus announced today that its long-awaited PC-based Rift virtual reality headset will be available for preorder starting this Wednesday, January 6, at 8am PST (11am EST). We still don't know precisely when the headset will be available or how much it will cost, but Rift pre-orders will include copies of VR-enabled games Eve: Valkyrie and Lucky's Tale.

The Rift itself is still officially on track for the same "Q1 2016" release window first announced back in May. The hand-tracking Oculus Touch controllers first demonstrated at last year's E3 were recently delayed to the second half of 2016, though; the Rift will initially ship with an Xbox One control pad.

The final price for the consumer unit is an even bigger mystery. Oculus said in October that the consumer edition will cost more than the $350 development kits but would remain "in that ballpark." Back in May, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said that a Rift and a fully specced PC capable of powering it should cost $1,500 total.