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potato_hamster on 20 August 2018
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DonFerrari said:
potato_hamster said:

Video games are not niche. They're the biggest entertainment industry on the planet and have showed steady growth for decades now. What do you call a small segment that takes up about 0.001% of that, and hasn't shown much growth at all in 30 years?
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Thank fuck you're not taking a random stranger's opinion at face value. Please, by all means, do not trust my opinion. The anaylsts at facebook get paid good money to make their estimates, and they should know what they're doing. That still doesn't mean they weren't wrong about VR. Again, they projected selling billions of dollars in headsets by 2020. So far this year they might, if they're lucky have 1/10th of that number. Do you see anything happening in the next year and a bit that is going to see Oculus's sales shoot up by 1000%? If not, then guess who you're not trusting about VR. The owners of Oculus. Oops.
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... no one considers the 1M sports car to be anything other than a niche car market, and certainly not mainstream. What a terrible example. No one needs a smart phone. The might need a phone, but they don't need to be able the play Angry Birds on the subway.
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I might be lacking imagination, but I also understand the fundamental laziness of the average gamer, and how little effort they're willing to put in to set up their living room to use some Implementations that, while neat and enhancing, just isn't so much better to be worth the effort. The fact that you expect me to "imagine the possibilities of VR" or expect me to cling on the idea that "there could be some game changing VR experience that will make playing X title so much better, you won't be able to play X title without it after you try it" just tells me that a lot of your positivity for VR comes in the form of hope.

Also, when the touchscreen phone came out, people were hesitant to switch because of the positive feedback of pushing buttons over tapping a screen. Phone makers spent millions creating clickable touchscreens and vibrating touchscreens and all kinds of other stuff to try and solve that problem, and to be frank, they're still trying to solve it. People have appeared to have gotten over it in general, but then again Blackberry started making phones with tactile keyboards again, so who knows? Maybe pure touchscreen phones will be taking a bit of a nosedive in sales until the tactile feedback issue is addressed properly.
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Motion gaming might have taken 30 years to bloom, but it took 5 to wilt back to where it came - a small niche market. The fact that no company could make it sustainable (even Nintendo) goes to show what limited appeal it truly had. The wii was novel, the Kinect was novel, but when that novelty wore off, people wanted to go back to regular controllers. Gamers appear to be a rather fickle audience. They're more than happy to try new things, but they're far more hesitant to invest in it, and even less likely to keep wanting to use it after a reasonable period of time. Do you want another example? Guitar Hero/Rock band. Care to make an argument that Guitar Hero isn't catering to a niche market in 2018? Guitar Hero 3 sold 15 million copies at $99 a pop. The latest one? 3 million. Better game, better controllers, more songs, better experience. 1/5th the sales.
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So now a handheld is any console that doesn't use a TV? That's a very interesting definition. I'd work on that one if I were you.  Are you trying to make the argument that I do not think that Virtual Boy was an embarrassment for Nintendo, even though I've said that many times already in this thread?

How is 3M on PS4 (PS4+X1+Switch = about 120M, but since it is just on PS4 it's 80M I'll consider) = 0.001% of the market?

And considering your silly examples of Nintendo Virtua boy 700k, versus PSVR that may cross 5M how can you say it stayed flat? You may deny as much as you want but this is the first generation of real tryout on VR, Nintendo tossed the system and cut it very very very fast.

If you want to look at it this way, screws are part of the car and probably less than 1% of the price of the car, are screws niche?

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Considering the points you brought here you are much more wrong than Facebook analysts, but thank god I didn't pay for your analysis nor invested in your projections of PS4Pro, X1X or Switch.

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You saying no one needs a smartphone is a very different reality than asking people why they buy their phones, they will certainly tell you it is a necessity item, much more than even a car, computer or even TV. Yes it is shocking.

Sure cars of 1M are niche, but are cars of 100k niche? But if people rather pay 100k instead of 10k but not buy console that shows consoles are niche certainly. That is how no sense your point on buying smartphone or tvs but not VR is.

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Nope, we know that the probable path of evolution on VR is small google without any wire, so that is when it will leave enthusiast to enter more mass market appeal. As people said it will be probably another 10-15 years before it really get there. For an enthusiast level, prototype like, product to sell 3M at 299 USD is quite good.

Blackberry bringing back qwerty keypads, good luck on that.

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Nintendo didn't even try to sustain it, just look at what WiiU was, and it wasn't motion control focused. You can enter 10 threads over WiiU failure and all will talk about the use of the gamepad instead of improved wiimote as one the biggest reason for failure.

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Virtua Boy also had batteries besides not using a TV, since we divide the market in consoles and HH I would say it's much more on HH than console market. Or do you want to say that over 20 years ago there were a market that only the 700k Virtua Boy was present? That certainly would be blue ocean. Still as I put the Virtua boy was a shame because it was less than 1M versus previous over 40M sales. That is in no way, shape or form relevant to Oculus or Vive being failures or a shame. The only way you can claim that is getting their projections and seeing if they were met.

Because VR is more than just the PSVR, and pertains to more than just consoles. There's the HTC Vive (PC), Oculus Rift(PC), Samsung Gear(Mobile), Google Daydream (Mobile).

And need I remind that Nintendo shipped 700K Virtual Boys in just 6-8 months. It's not really fair to just compare the total sales of the Virtual Boy over its tiny lifetime to the total sales of the PSVR which will be sold for years.

And your screws example is another abysmally terrible analogy. I can't even begin to address all the things wrong with it.
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I am much more wrong than Facebook analysts? I sure hope so. Otherwise my skillset is being put to waste and I'm being severely underpaid. But what are my projections on PS4 Pro, X1X and Switch? Please remind me.
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The Phone part of their smart phone can easily be considered a necessity. Can the ability to play angry birds be considered a necessity?

And yes, 100K cars are certainly niche. They represent probably less than 5% of total automotive sales are. Do you know what isn't niche? sub 25K compact cars. Can you figure out why?

And you're still not undertstanding. If someone owns a smartphone they paid $800 for and wants a VR solution but ISNT willing to pay $800 for it, then they're saying that they'd rather be able to do things like play Angry Birds on their phone than play VR. If someone owns a 100K car and doesn't give a shit about video games, then them not buying a VR headset doesn't matter because they don't want one anyways! It only matters if they want one but aren't willing to pay the asking price.
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So the *only reason* VR isn't currently more popular is because the headsets are too big and aren't wireless? Then explain the poor sales of the Oculus Go. It's wireless, cheaper and smaller than the PSVR. Why isn't the Oculus Go selling at a rate higher than PSVR?

Look at you being all pessimistic on Blackberry. "It's a pretty clear the advantage Blackberry brings to smartphones, you just don't like it. But you refuse to accept that you are being very negative." Sound familiar?
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Nintendo didn't even try to sustain it? Was it the motion controlled main pad of the Wii U that made you think that? Or was it the fact that the only other controllers that worked with the Wii U were Wii Remotes that made you think it? Perhaps Nintendo putting motion controls in the 3DS must have made you think they hadn't tried. Or maybe it was offering yet another motion based option on the Switch that let you know they reallly couldn't care less about motion controls.

And why would I look at other threads? I thought the opinions of anonymous people on the internet weren't to be trusted. Now I'm supposed to count on them to let me know why the Wii U was a failure? I can find plenty of analysts that make no such insistence that the Wii U failed because it didn't include upgrades Wii remotes as the primary controller.

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So that's it, it must not have to hook up to a TV and it must be able to use batteries in order to be considered a handheld console. You still might want to reconsider that.

So again, when Facebook acquired Oculus, they projected they were going to ship $2.8 billion of Oculus headsets annually by 2020. It appears they will miss that forecast by at least 80% and that's being conservative. So Oculus is not meeting projections.  In order to meet it's projections, Oculus is going to need to sell 8-12 million headsets per year in a little over a year. As it appears right now, they won't have even sold 4 million total by that point. So do you think facebook can turn it around and turn a few hundred thousand units per year in 2018 to 8-12 million by 2020, or are you willing to call that one a "missed projection" right now?