I imagine the insane price to entry is a big thing.
I had some disposable cash so I went with the index, I love it don’t get me wrong but, 1k is super fucking steep for an enjoyable system, and that’s ontop of the requirement they do it right when they make a game, many of them take vr as a minority and you can tell when a game puts it on the side burner
people choose consoles over pcs for comfort
people choose pc for its capabilities (and for some, a different kind of comfort)
people choose vr for the experience only - and it can get old quite quickly because the market is too small - not enough ‘content’
VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.
Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.
Wearing a headset isn’t appealing to me. I’d rather get a curved screen or more screens to be more immersed.
I use it for sim racing sometimes and it’s amazing to feel like I’m in an F1 car or something. Until I get nauseous after 15 minutes or something. It’s also a bit of a hassle to set up. That being said, maybe it would be cooler if I got into beat saber or something.
Was it over hyped? Maybe. But it’s still a cool technology and I’d be sad to see it fall into nothingness. I don’t see a future where everyone is wearing VR glasses, but it’s still a very neat thing to enjoy every now and then.
I mean the hype has died down but I think it’s rather that VR is too expensive right now. I want VR but I don’t want it $500 much to get a novelty item.
I think using it as a big ass screen would be nice and I really want to Serious Sam and Subnautica on VR. The immersion is really good for VR and I’ve liked it a lot every time I’ve played it.
Still, you need a decent space in the living room. A good graphics card for the frame rate and the expensive headset and motion trackers to get the full experience. That’s a lot to ask for with the current economy.
It will always be 1993 for vr.
It will always be the future.
It will always suck.
It’s only that way because developers don’t seem to be, you know… Developing shit for it.
Like, I love a lot of what’s available and the tech itself is great; but there is no killer app. There is next to nothing but novelty bullshit being made. Even if Meta wasn’t the one with the cheapest headset, people wouldn’t necessarily be buying into VR because there’s not really much to do with it yet.
One Half-Life game, a chatroom, and a bitching rythym game isn’t enough.
It’s killer app to me is sim racing but it requires too much additional investment
What, like a wheel and some pedals? Or would you go full-on actual car stuff? I met a guy once who turned the entire back half of his trailer into a plane cockpit for his flight sims. Had actual instruments and switches and stuff. I’m sure with what it had to cost, he could have just bought a real plane. lol
I personally don’t feel like spending 700 or how many euros to play beat saber on my ps5.
Other games that might be awesome in this is ones were you don’t need to move around but benefit from being able to look around, so flight sims, driving sims, but there the chair setups are better imo.
Can’t really think of much else, that’s why VR is on the decline, really limited number of fun games to be had, or it would require some paradigm shift, like a strategy game but you are playing on the inside of a globe, but then that game would have to survive on being a VR exclusive.
More games and a Matrix-esque visual file manager where you could walk through various libraries of documents, files, videos or pictures in 3D space, or proportional size like WinDirStat would be cool.
The lack of good games has really made VR hard to enjoy. I have five good evergreen titles and not much else.
A VR mech game could be so baller. Also a remake of Black and White would work well. But generally yeah it’s just not a great medium for most games and while we have a lot of promising hardware we’re struggling to find ways to use it intuitively
I think after the bubble breaks it does down a bit well see some groups take their time to build really functional stuff. We don’t have good standards on how to interact in VR and it shows. We don’t have enough data on how to make people less motion sick. Basically the hardware is there but the software isn’t and that’ll take more time than we’ve been giving it, imo
Realistically though I think the fundamental limits on how you can interact in VR means while there may be a strong niche market, I don’t expect it to be a mainstream thing. Even if the prices drop a lot and the headsets get smaller there’s still a lot working against them
A remake of Black and White would just be amazing, period
I think it would take off if Facebook wasn’t involved
I’m not going to lie: I would own a Quest 3 already if it didn’t have Meta all over it.
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
It’d legitimately be easier to fit an arcade cabinet in my house than space for proper VR play.
My brother bought the cv1 Oculus Rift pretty fast after it came out, we’ve both used it for most of the big releases and I’ve been wanting to buy my own since, but there’s been a bit of hesitation considering my brother early uses his own. I also had reservations against buying a Facebook device after they took over, and I was seeing new releases and resolutions going up a bit.
Then information about the Big Screen Beyond came out, and I really wanted to get it. I checked out the page to buy it several times, kinda wanted to save the money too, though, but I think I was close enough that if I’d known anyone with the facescan iPhone I’d have done the scan and paid the ~$1,500 or so for the full setup.
Knowing myself and my brother, I would have played multiplayer occasionally and bought a few favorite games like Until You Fall, Bonelab, B&S, and Alyx but mostly it would end up sitting unused. I kinda also wanted to develop for VR but I probably wouldn’t have done anything more than the two shitty assets I once imported poorly into Blade and Sorcery.
Right now I’m glad I have the $1,500 now because there are car issues to take care of. Ultimately I think VR is beautiful, but my world is still a little too rough around the edges to pay huge sums for a daydreaming toy.
I sometimes use VR. I have a Quest 2. I just don’t really care for any of it outside of linking it up to my PC and playing custom tracks on Beat Saber or getting my wheel out for racing games.
One of the scariest experiences was getting Wreckfest (not sure if it supports VR now but it didn’t when I used it), stretching the 2D screen around me, jacking up the POV and having a heart attack when getting side swiped by a bus. That’s probably the most fun I’ve had with a VR Headset 😂
I’ve also played Civ V on VR just for shits and giggles because why not.
This is why there hasn’t been a refresh on the Valve Index: not enough interest, not enough games. Half Life Alyx is still one of the few major games with any depth to them in the market, and you can’t access it easily outside of the Steam ecosystem. In other words, it’s unavailable for a lot of VR headsets. They aren’t going to dump more resources into more VR games if people aren’t buying the headsets or the games.
Steam Deck on the other hand? Huuuuuuge market, people want that shit.
Stand alone headsets can play PCVR games too, especially steam games, that is the most accessible market for PCVR on standalone. Most do it wirelessly, which likely isn’t as bad as you are thinking, but some also still do it with wired and some even with uncompressed video over wire. But honestly, as the resolution and bitrate keep going up, the difference between raw and compressed gets harder and harder to spot. At this point, you can only really tell in side by side comparisons of still frames which feed is compressed.
The main remaining problem of compressed streams is the total latency added, most importantly the decompressing time, since it’s done on the headsets mobile hardware. And the networking time. Though a dedicated network device, either a router or a bespoke VR streaming tool can get that down to 5ms or less now. My streams total latency to my wireless headset is about 30ms now. I wouldn’t be able to professionally compete in a frame counting fighter game… but that is about the only type of game where that level of latency is too much. Heck, people of my generation grew up through a point in time where TV screen latency was over 100ms… And while I will admit that there is still a benefit to sub 14ms latency, it’s not as big of a difference as it used to be. And that is only when I stream PCVR stuff, it’s still under that for stand alone content. Which also is not as bad as you likely think it is.
I have a total of about 250 VR games currently, and I only buy about 10% of the ones I want to buy. But I have also been in VR for 10 years now. About 150 of my games are standalone and about 100 PCVR. With about 30 of them being titles that gave both versions for the price of one. There is no shortage of games, I could not possibly play even all of just the good ones.
A VR headset is basically a console now, except one you can stream your PC to if you want. Even just for flat games too, I have a Virtual 4k 120hz monitor in my VR headset because in real life my 4k screen is an older TV that can only do 60 hz pc input or a very janky 120hz for 1080p. The nice thing about streaming to a VR headset instead of some hand held device, other than 4k 120fps, is that I don’t have to look at my hands or hold my hands up to my eyes to play. My neck feels so much better than it did when Phone, Switch, and Steamdeck were the best way to game away from a computer.
My headset is comfortable, I can, and unfortunately often do, wear it for 16 hours a day. I have a single third party mod for it that was less than 100 dollars to convert it from a 2 hour headset, to an infinity headset. There are multiple options, but I went with BoBoVR, dumb name, but quality product.
But my headset has basically replaced my computer monitor, I haven’t used my computer in person in like 2 years now. When I want to play a game on my computer, I just stay in my recliner, put my headset on and open Virtual Desktop, the same software I use to stream PCVR when I’m in the mood to be in the game instead.
There is basically no downside anymore, they aren’t even expensive. While a Quest 3 is notably better, the lower end 3s is a totally viable headset at 300USD, notably cheaper than most consoles. Just do yourself a favor, if a Quest 3 seems too expensive, do not try it on. Stay with 3s and don’t see how much greener the grass is for a little bit more, it’s very easy to talk your way up to a real Quest 3.
Also, Steam deck has sold about 5 million units extrapolating from last known good data, Quest 2 sold over 20 million, Quest 3 is seemingly up to 10-15 million so far judging from old sales data for pacing and some recently reported hardware ratios from game devs, and still has about 4-5 more years left of active sales.
So if the Steam deck is a “huge market”, then I don’t know what you would call the stand alone VR market now. Considering that is just one brand of standalone headset. It’s the market leader, sure, but there are other brands that do at least as well as the steam deck. Distant second as that may make them, seems like it’s still relevant to include given the context.
I hate to say this, but I played through Half-Life: Alyx and my response was to the effect of “…That’s it?”
It performed badly, gameplay was largely based around very uncreative shooting (take out gun, shoot combine 10 times around corner, eject magazine, reach back, put magazine into gun, pull slide, shoot around corner 4 more times, repeat) and there were only 3 guns. Even the gravity gloves weren’t used in combat.
I was even more wowed by the few VR combat games that made some innovations or had features in the level to outsmart enemies.
True, but there are 2 sides to this: the majority won’t buy VR, unless there are enough games to play.
Studios should be actually investing and taking a risk, maybe it works out and becomes a big market, maybe not. If they keep going the current path, VR will forever remain an expensive niche gimmick. Which they seem to okay with.
There are probably better returns on making games for the existing markets, vs gambling money making games hoping to grow a new market. If VR ever truly takes off, they can always jump in later. (Which is a shame because I would love it if there were a ton of great VR games)
That’s not why. There’s a very high chance Valve is actively working on new standalone VR since some years, there are regular leaks confirming some progress.
I’ve long been skeptical about VR as a mainstream platform. I think the technology is quite cool, but much like those people who used to say “In ten years everyone will have a 3D printer!” and the like, no, I just don’t see it happening. The hassle factor is too great for it to be for everyone. Hell, most people seem to be fine with stereo sound, even though surround sound setups have been available for decades.
Whether it’s space, cost, or lack of software support, it all seems to combine to make it a bit of hobbyist kit at best. If your goal is to sell millions of copies then you need to target a broader market than hobbyists, and it looks like a lot of companies have ploughed enough cash into this that hobbyist sales aren’t going to be enough.
