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Mummelmann on 05 January 2017
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aLkaLiNE said:
Mummelmann said:

VR was touted as a big deal in here since at least a year back, I've maintained that it's too expensive and not nearly well enough implemented to make any difference in traditional gaming and that sales overall would be slow. That still seems to have been a correct assumption, even the cheap smartphone glasses have only sold a few million worldwide (these are like 30-50$ a piece).

VR is too soon, mainstream hardware isn't really close to good enough to properly utilize it either yet, which further decreases the value.

That's because VR is a big deal. It always would have arrived "too soon" unless you had multiple media conglomerate/corporations magically agreeing to all at once push for VR. That wasn't gonna happen though, so instead we're getting the first wave of companies making the plunge and laying the groundwork moving forward. It is too soon, but that's out of necessity. Tech has reached a level where the end result has become acceptable to the consumer. It's only up from here

Is VR a big deal? Global sales figures strongly disagree, and that's my whole point. For now, VR is having about the same impact as Kinect did on traditional gaming and all available VR sets between them have sold somewhere around 2 million through all of 2016, that's hardly earth-shattering by any measure.

VR isn't a sales incentive for console or PC gamers right now, and won't be for a few years when the hardware can actually utilize it properly and there's some actual implementation in traditional gaming. For now, VR is something quirky that you test in the store and tell your buddies about, but odds are that no one in this thread own a VR set, and won't any time soon. Groundwork? Perhaps, but there are no walls, roof, floors, electricity, plumbing or interior details yet, so it's far from a house, which is exactly the point I've been making all along. VR could very well be a major factor in a few years, but there is absolutely no reasoning that it is a major factor now, it's quite close to utterly irrelevant as it stands right now.

3D was also said to be the next big thing a few years back, but it flopped hard in the TV and DVD/blu-ray market and the demand for 3D in cinemas is not exactly sky high either, this is also mainly due to the fact that most 3D is quite poor, and thus has diminished value as a feature.