Irlut

Development for VR is an absolute pain. Until relatively recently there was very little coherence between development frameworks. That made supporting different platforms really difficult, especially when it comes to PCVR vs standalone. The development toolchains have gotten a lot better in the last few years, but there’s still a significant amount of jank that you have to resolve.

This is to say nothing of testing against different headsets and platforms with very different capabilities. It just takes up a lot of development time, which is usually in very very short supply for games companies. Hence, development tends to target the least capable platform (usually the Quest) and let the other platforms use less than their full capabilities.

Yes, people should generally get more exercise. However, you’re very much missing the point here: every game requiring physical excertion is not necessarily a selling point. Simply put, sometimes people just want to be couch potatoes and we have very well developed forms of interaction to support that. We’ve already seen the whole embodied interaction thing happen when the Nintendo Wii platform, and their interaction technology changed for the Switch for a reason. Basically, people don’t seem to want to be waving their arms around unless they explicitly choose to play an exergame.

This is the entire reason why I’m calling VR a gimmick. It is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, and isn’t really bringing enough to the table in terms of gaming experiences to warrant the high cost of entry to the medium for the vast majority of gamers.

The problem is the size of the potential player base. A VR headset for $300-500 (and that’s on the low end) is already a big ask for one game, but then you also need a gaming PC. To get the full fat immersive experience you’ll need a fairly beefy PC (3070 or better, 11th gen Intel or 3000 series AMD CPU etc) and a Valve Index ($1000 iirc). The costs add up very quickly, and that’s a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people. That’s also why the Quest 2 is such a common target for development: it’s relatively more affordable and as a result has a much bigger install base.

There’s also a whole slew of physical space issues with being tied to a computer that the standalone headsets solves, but that’s a broader argument beyond the cost of the headset itself.

You’re kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don’t really add anything that didn’t already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn’t really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.

Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they’re also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there’s a certain barrier to entry for playing them.

I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there’s some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don’t have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.

Again, there really isn’t much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it’s kind of a fun experience that isn’t very meaningful.

I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.

VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don’t offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It’s just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.

VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.