honestly the whole xbox -  oculus partner ship seems like nothing but a big PR move. to get people talking about xbox one and oculus, as if there was anything substantial in the announcement or things they showed. it seems like an announcement to graner reactions like this from news sites, or this from the consumers. 

at the end of the day, it seems as its just nothing but a stunt to get some headlines assossiating VR with the xbox one, to likely hide the fact that the Xbox One will most likely never get VR in its life time, and the Playstation 4 will get it next year. a poor attempt to get on the VR hype bandwagon because they have nothing to show, while Sony is going in full force. 

im not talking about the controller/oculus partnership, thats more of a logical business decision. im talking about the streaming nonesense they showed. and yes i know they said this is just the start of the partnership, but that also helps my point, more PR and nothing to back it off. 

It may be a PR stunt but it could also enhance the gaming experience of Xbox owners if they do it right.

At this point, I agree with ya that it seems like a PR stunt. Maybe they'll showcase some other games later into E3. I'm interested to see how it plays out after sony shows off Morpheus and some games for it (maybe No Man's Sky).

Basically.

The fact that people, as well as the media, pay any substantial attention to VR in general is a symptom of the video game industry's sorry state. The simple truth is that developers fail to innovate with new gameplay ideas, and instead resort to the Nintendo strategy. A strategy which proved to be greatly rewarding short-term at best.

The Wii U GamePad is seen as clumsy by most core gamers. Yet for some reason we are to believe that they'd be willing to play games under conditions where their entire vision of the outside world is impaired?

^ Who cares about vision outside? when you can live inside the gameworld as long as your wearing a VR headset?

Its the differnce between looking at a screen, and "virtually" being inside the game (if done right).

Your grossly underestimateing VR.
And compairing it with the nintendo gamepad.... shame on you.

Are you serious? Even if you don't particularly like the idea of VR, you can't use a word like 'impaired' in association with VR, it's disingenuous. The whole point in VR is that your vision of an alternative world is 'enhanced'.

The OP is right, MS are deliberately using this. MS do this all the time:

HD-DVD was mever a Blu-ray alternative simply because Blu-ray was supported by a hell of a lot more people but it held back sales of Blu-ray for a while which was their objective

MS coined the word 'Parity' back on the 360 so that they could put 1080(p) on their game boxes. This was designed to confuse consumers

Sony announced the Gaikai acquisition which was a cloud based gaming tech and MS then began talking about Cloud all the time. This was once again to accociate the word 'cloud' with the XB1 and they still do it to this day. Fortunately Sony don't even mention cloud any more and choose to just relate to PSNow as a service.

And now we have VR

But have you seen the responce its actually getting from people that watch the demo? Not the most positive spin MS could put on it, they messed that up.

VR if done right, can be much more immersive. Progress in terms of gameplay on a TV has pretty much reached a plateau with even highly praised titles like The Witcher III and Bloodborne not really containing anything groundbreaking(great gameplay though) so VR might be similar to the progression of 2D to 3D titles in the fifth generation of consoles. The gamepad really brought nothing new to the table, VR can.

Of course, consumers will dictate with their dollars if VR takes off or not.

Reading through some of the forums, it's pretty clear this move is pissing off a lot of PC gamers. I think Oculus just gave Vive a huge advantage.