Regardless of how much they cost, these cards at any price will sell at most in the hundreds of thousands to actual PC gamers (as opposed to enterprise or crytocurrency mining). No where near console levels, and even console sales will be dwarfed by VR-capable mobile device sales. So in terms of being a driver for VR adoption, PC is pretty irrelevant to the discussion (consoles will prob be too in the grand scheme of things), and the majority of the gaming consumer market will not even concern themselves with what is going on on that platform.
Except there is the whale mentality. There are people very willing to pay for $1500 titans or multiple $600 video cards. Yes its a minority but at the same time they will drive the cost down for the others and will be willing to support the software for it.
Cheap video cards will drop in price quickly. It also wont take long for low end laptops to catch up or surpass what the ps4 is capable of.
Out of the 200m or so people who are willing to buy a console a large portion are also extremely price sensitive. We saw the failure of the ps3 at $500/$600 and the xbox one at $500 Morpheus will have an additional cost over the ps4. We don't know what it is, but at $200-$400 for Morpheus your looking at a ps4 vr experience being $600-$800
Again you're missing the point quite a bit. Screen quality will probably eclipse that of Morpheus, just as phone screen resolution is now much higher than the screens we watch TV on in our living room. That's all well and good, but the point is Morphues may be "good enough" for the mainstream consumer, who is the section of the market the bulk of development investment in games and software will be going towards catering to.
But for the average consumer Morpheus and a ps4 may be good enough but its also more expensive and tethered. In the united states you can get a galaxy s6 for $200 plus $200 for the gear vr. That's the cost of the naked ps4 before a camera and Morpheus.
Morpheus is going to launch q1/2 of 2016 and by then the galaxy 7 will be launching which means you'd be able to get a galaxy s6 in the states for $100 with $200 for the gear vr bringing you to $300. Which is most likely what Morpheus itself will require. You can then get an s7 for $200 with the newest gear vr for $200.
At that lower entry price you also get a wireless experience .
Morpheus will be able to spit out VR games at an order of magnitude higher visual fidelity and gameplay complexity than any mobile VR game, for the foreseeable future, or at least certainly until the natural successor of PS4 launches. So the point you're making here is moot. Mobile will never offer the same kind of VR gaming experience that Morpheus and PC will, and Morpheus may well outsell PC VR headsets by a significant margin (I certainly expect it too at least for gaming experiences).
But like I said it will be sandwiched in between phones and consoles. Phones at least in some markets will be cheaper and most likely have higher quality screens. Morpheus will have a higher refresh rate and better looking games and then you have the pc which will have a leap again of graphical power and then better screens and perhaps a similar refresh rate.
Each year mobile hardware will chip away at the power of the ps4 while the screens get better. At some point the graphics will be near enough and the screens will be far enough away in quality and of course the convincence of not being tethered to a large box in your living room or bed room becomes enough that the ps4 is no longer an attractive experience for vr . I bet its way before the ps5 comes out
With Facebook owning Occulus, I can see alot of non-gaming VR apps blowing up hugely on mid/low/end PCs and mobile, being much bigger than Morpheus. But then that won't in anyway affect PS4, Morpheus nor Sony's position on whether or not to wait out a natural console upgrade cycle. We are talking PS4 logevity after all.
we are talking about the ps4 longevity and I think your wrong on that end. The phone side will provide a portable experience that will improve with each upgrade cycle you enter. So every 2 years people will be walking into new phones with better hardware and a better vr experience.
If a competitor jumps on a new console early and focuses on vr then Morpheus is dead in its tracks
Mobile will never reach a point where they outperform a PS4. They're just barely outperforming PS360's now, and even then gaming software at last-gen fidelity STILL isn't even a thing on mobile platforms! VR will be even worse.
That's more an issue of battery life , budget and controls. My year old note 3 should easily out perform a 360.
Console competitors coming out with a new console, too early in the cycle, to try to out compete with Sony who has enjoyed 2+ years already of free, uncontested console VR monopoly, are going to see such a strategy crash and burn woefully, just like the OG Xbox and WiiU did.
Or they could find success like the xbox 360.
From a Ninty/MS perspective, launching a new VR console in 2017 to compete with the PS4 is going to be suicide. By then PS4 will be the defacto dominant platform for VR on consoles, with all the awards for being first to market with their product, like having an already established software library for their box. By doing a mid-gen update Nin/MS will run the risk of
a) pissing off their existing userbase who will be upset that you just killed off their shiny new XB1 (more in the case of MS),
b) driving more gamers towards your oponent's platform as you start to divert dev resources to the new platform and gamers start feeling neglected by the lack of first party support (XB360 says hi),
c) launching a box that simply isn't enough of a technological leap forward that gamers feel it isn't worth the price of entry (OGXbox/WiiU says hi).
THe xbox 360 was launched 4 years after the xbox . It was a huge success for MS
A) if they stay with amd they can continue to easily support the xbox one and the similaritys between the one and ps4 will make sure it continues to get ports. There shouldn't be a reason why a $200 or less console couldn't existg next to a $400 console. The psone still sold extremely well into the life of the ps2
B] like I said above , support for the xbox one should be fine as its very similar to the ps4 a 2017/18 next box would be 4 to 5 holidays the xbox one would be the main console from ms , more than enough support
C) 2017 would allow for either 2nd gen 14nm parts or 1 gen 10nm parts , hbm 2 , ssd drives. 2017 could also mean on the head set side 4k screens
And don't forget that you assume sony would be the one in the dominate postion , however it could also just as likely put sony in the akward postion of being off the schedual. Sony could 2 years later release a ps5 but you'd be 2 years into a new console cycle and that 2 years on the market could easily cause the core to move on. The core doesn't mind faster moves and better tech
I honestly don't see MS sitting on their asses and letting Sony rule the console VR market as the sole player for the next two years. It would be beyond foolish.
I believe one of two things will happen at e3 for ms's vr front. 1) they have a gaming only hololens that ties into the xbox one or 2) they have a deal with facebook for oculus
No, what you will have in reality is a situation where Occulus/ValveVR compete with each other for the scraps of the miniscule high end PC gamer market. Sony making bank on consoles after already selling a metric crap tonne prior to Morpheus launching, they now begin a new VR gaming craze on the most accessible of the two platforms (console and PC), and enjoy a free lunch as MS scrambles in the background with Hololens trying desperately to convince us that it can actually do what the original concept videos showed... honest. Whilst your hypothetical new VR console gets released, after two years of PS4 Morpheus dominance, and is seen as "nothing new" and "mee too™" and "a stop-gap console", enjoying only meagre sales whilst the rest of the mainstream gaming industry waits for the PS5.
what you'll have is everyone and their grandma buying pc vr to use to surf vr facebook on pc while everyone looks at the amazing pc experiances for gaming and wonders why their ps4 can't do the same. You then have MS becoming the defacto company making wearables for the business world
It would be MS/Ninty who would be in the weird place not Sony.
The launch of the OG Xbox against the PS2's success is a lesson that mid-gen/early HW updates are a risky proposition. MS certainly learned that the hard way.
From a certain point of view. You could make the case that the OG xbox was a lesson that late more powerful hardware looses to weaker early hardware. The xbox 360 shows that early hw updates allows you to go forom selling 24m units to 80m units
If you really want to get into it. Look at Nintendo. The nes came out when everyone else failed. But Sega put out the genesis 18 months before the super nes. It allowed them to go from selling 13m consoles with the master system to 40m with the genesis. Nintendo went from 61.91m to 49.1m that generation. Then they waited on the n64 that came out roughly 18 months after the ps1 and sony out of no where went from 0 to 102m while Nintendo went from 49.1m super nes to 32.92m on the gamecube. Then Nintendo went second again by a year with the game cube and fell further behind to 21.74m while sony went up to 155m. MS entered in 2001 also and outsold the gamecube. Then it launched before sony and ended up in a dead heat with them.
), but MS's overly western approach this gen(among other issues) doesn't gel that good with me, and Nintendo has less than a handful of games i would want a year on Wii U, which made it very hard for me to justify owning the console(which is why i sold mine on top of not having a standardized controller, can't stand that tablet)
