Luckey offered no apologies for his appearance on the cover of Time this summer…

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.”