We may just have different approaches to this sort of thing. My personal experience has been that my VR development PC, which cost me around $1200 in the fall,

We may just have different approaches to this sort of thing. My personal experience has been that my VR development PC, which cost me around $1200 in the fall, has been great. I opted for parts just below the top of the line because I thought that would be the sweet spot. (I opted for a GTX 1070 rather than a 1080 for example). I have had no issues so far, but perhaps over the longer term I'll wish I had opted for the top of the line build. That is not the case yet. I see your point about buying for the long term savings rather than needing to upgrade every year. I haven't yet had issues with that but that may be true over a longer period of time. Additionally, if you choose to buy a PC prebuilt rather than building it yourself it costs a lot more so your price range becomes more accurate than my estimates. That said if I were to give a cost estimate to someone who wanted to get a PC for VR development I'd tell them they can build a PC that can run everything for around $1200 USD and it would be completely adequate for development work for at least a year or two. As someone pointed out above that doesn't include the headsets, so the whole endeavour is still quite expensive.