| OdinHades said: I also love VR, don't get me wrong. But it's still a niche and it will always be a niche. Most people simply don't care about it and it's too much of a hassle. With the last iteration of headsets, the manufacturers obviously expected a much higher success. There were dreams about everyone and their mother using VR for Facebook and whatnot. Now some time later we see that even gamers care little about it and the most successful headsets, the mobile ones, barely sell more than 2 million a year. It failed at the mass market miserably and that is not going to change anytime soon. Because of that, developers are turned off. There is just no money to be made with VR. Developing games is expensive as fuck and the install base is a joke. Ports of old games like Skyrim and patches for some existing games is all there is to it. Many folks don't like the comparison between VR and 3D. And I know why. 3D actually sold better. Much better. So, while I'm looking forward to play Fallout 4 in VR and really really adore Elite Dangerous in VR, I still won't give in to the imagination that VR is some kind of game changer. |
I think VR will follow a path like PC gaming. VR now is where PC gaming was in the eighties. Interesting yet falling way short to consoles in price, quality and ease of use while the idea of having arcade level game experience at home was quickly crushed. PCs were a niche back then, glorified typewriters that still needed an expensive peripheral to print out your work. Yet it stuck around ofcourse and slowly grew to hapilly exist along console gaming as equals. I just hope it doesn't take 3 decades with VR to get there.
The problems VR faces atm are all that, expensive, not easy to set up and use, and games look simple compared to juicy 4K screenshot games. It's kind of an inflated bubble atm with the rate new headsets are announced and perhaps we'll get a VR crash at some point, but I don't think it will disappear again. Competition is good, driving innovation and refinements.
The comparison to 3D is flawed. 3D doesn't work that well on a small screen. It still doesn't work that well in VR due to fixed perspective. I tried watching Tangled and Prometheus on PSVR. While the resolution is fine for that, the fixed perspective ruins it. I didn't watch more than 10 minutes of either, the crappy static 3D effect is not worth wearing any glasses for. (3D left me unimpressed in the cinema as well)
Ofcourse it doesn't help that 360 videos are the first thing many people experience in VR. And if Heroes of the seven seas (I just played the psvr port) is any indication of the quality of games on Gear VR I understand why it will leave people uninterested after a few tries.
Anyway it's a game changer for me and I love experiencing where it's going. For now PSVR still has more interesting games on offer and in the pipeline than I have time for. The way it's going only Mario Odyssey will have a chance to get the headset off :)
