Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

I do.
I'm not blaming this on Valve, I'm blaming it on Crytek.

Regardless, having to keep a tabs on either you have the correct VR headset or not is quite bothersome. One should assume a brand new $800 VR headset purchased on Steam should be compatible with all VR games available on Steam.

Blame the VR market. The VR market isn't large enough to support VR game development on its own. It requires heavy subsidizing by companies willing to take a loss on investment in order to grow the market.

Sony and Oculus realize this and are pumping money into developers to try to get games made for VR. They understand that they're going to be losing money until the market grows large enough to start generation profits. However, to minimize losses (30% of game revenue just by being sold in their respective stores), they require some level of exclusivity (timed exclusivity in the case of Oculus) if a developer wishes to use their investment dollars.

Valve until relatively recently didn't give a rats arse about the game development aspect and how it was difficult for developers to pump money into developing a game that they were extremely likely to lose a lot of money on. That's not an environment conducive to development of anything other than shovelware and very basic games. And hence that's predominantly what you see developed and sold on Steam.

Steam is by far the worse place to get a VR game just because Valve were unwilling to foot a large part of the development bill for companies willing to take a shot at making a VR game. All the people crying about Oculus or Sony buying exclusivity, well yeah. Because if they didn't those game would never get made in the first place. It sucks, but that's the reality of the situation.

Luckily for VR gamers, Valve finally realized that developers need monetary help if they want to make a more full featured game. They still aren't pumping as much money into game development as Oculus or Sony, but it's a start.

You can't compare this to development of 3D accelerated games which require hardware 3D acceleration. The market for those games is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the market for VR games. A developer can invest a lot of money into make a traditional game knowing that if the game is good, they're quite likely to make a profit. A developer investing even a fraction of that money into a VR game would basically be committing business suicide as even if it was a really good game it wouldn't sell enough to make back their investment.

If you go back in time to when 3D accelerated hardware was in its infancy like the current VR market, you'll find a 3D accelerated versions of games that were exclusive to S3 hardware, ATI hardware, etc. because those companies paid the developers to make a 3D accelerated version of the game because it wouldn't have been profitable to the developer to make a 3D accelerated version and attempt to sell it. The NVidia NV1 in particular had a lot of exclusive games just due to how it went about 3D rendering.

Regards,
SB
 
Sony and Oculus realize this and are pumping money into developers to try to get games made for VR.
From what I gather, there's no pumping and plenty of trickling. Facebook's investment is something like 50 million a year, which is 'back of the sofa' change to FB and not much to create new content. Sony have a few first party creations but aren't offering any bonuses to indies AFAIK.
 
Sales are a mess. For Oculus specifically popularity is a mess.

Low sales do not equate to "a mess". They're just low sales. VR is incredibly easy to use on PC if you have a Rift (easily the match of any console), and only slightly less easy if you have a Vive. And there's certainly no shortage of content.

Of course sales of PSVR are much higher - as expected - due to the cost of both the headset and the base hardware, but that's always been the case for high end PC hardware so hardly constitutes a mess.

Incidentally there doesn't seem to be that much difference between Vive and Oculus sales for last year. Specifically 500k for Vive and 400K for Rift (vs 800K for PSVR).

https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/media-alert-over-2-million-vr-headsets-ship-2016
 
These are analyst numbers, so unreliable without decent evidence that this analyst is accurate. We can't compare device sales at all at this point as they could be anything - no-one's talking!
Someone is talking, though:

Multiple "Oculus Ambassador" workers BI spoke with said that, at most, they would sell a few Oculus headsets per week during the holiday season, and that foot traffic to their pop-ups decreased drastically after Christmas.
“There’d be some days where I wouldn’t give a demo at all because people didn’t want to," said one worker at a Best Buy in Texas who asked to remain anonymous. Another worker from California said that Oculus software bugs would often render his demo headsets unusable.
“They didn’t press on selling," the worker from Texas said of Oculus. "Their main thing was to have us do demonstrations and get people talking about Oculus.”
 
It's all anecdotal. None of the 3 VR providers is talking numbers. Neither are any sales aggregators. Thus we have literally no data to compare sales of the devices. We only have the vaguest of numbers and a few anecdotes and uncorroborated analysts figures which isn't enough for a meaningful conversation (and only enough for fanboys in other fora to make juvenile arguments in favour of the preferred brand).
 
We don't have numbers but we can tell from those testimonies that the Rift isn't exactly flying off the shelves. We also have Mark Zuckberg telling investors that VR's acquisition won't be profitable for a while, meaning Oculus' hardware + software sales minus production minus distribution minus developer rewards isn't being profitable right now.

They just aren't selling any meaningful number of units. It isn't that hard to reach that conclusion.

And the problem is that VR can only get so much hype from social media. Come late 2017 and we're probably going to see a shift in attention to something else.
They won't have the engadgets + theverges + pcgamers et al talking about VR indefinitely. Eventually, people will get tired of hearing about VR and those sites will shift their focus onto something else that will bring them more clicks.

Their window of opportunity is fading and it's due to mismanagement IMO.
HTC+Valve releasing the Vive without anyone ever hearing of those 3 full Valve games for a full year was a mistake. Oculus coming up at almost twice the price that had previously been suggested was a mistake. Consumer Oculus Rift coming out without VR controllers/wands was a mistake. Oculus engaging in software platform exclusivity was a mistake, as that's not how the PC ecosystem works at all.


IMO Sony did the best approach by far (half the price + lots of VR titles on day one, even if some of those were overpriced). Microsoft seems to be following suit with their $300 headsets.
 
You've asserted sales are a mess. How many Vive have been sold? How many Rifts? How many PSVRs?

We also have Mark Zuckberg telling investors that VR's acquisition won't be profitable for a while, meaning Oculus' hardware + software sales minus production minus distribution minus developer rewards isn't being profitable right now.

They just aren't selling any meaningful number of units. It isn't that hard to reach that conclusion.
If you read between the lines with one's personal bias, it's easy to reach conclusions. Another interpretation is that it'll be a while before the $2+ billion investment is recovered. Well at (numbers from my arse) $300 profit per sale, plus $200 from software fees, that'd require 4 million units to break even.

We have no way of knowing how to interpret that statement. Nor Sony's 'we're happy with PSVR sales' comment. About the only thing we can really conclude is VR isn't doing gangbusters. Relative performance is very much an unknown.
 
You've asserted sales are a mess. How many Vive have been sold? How many Rifts? How many PSVRs?

If you read between the lines with one's personal bias, it's easy to reach conclusions. Another interpretation is that it'll be a while before the $2+ billion investment is recovered. Well at (numbers from my arse) $300 profit per sale, plus $200 from software fees, that'd require 4 million units to break even.

We have no way of knowing how to interpret that statement. Nor Sony's 'we're happy with PSVR sales' comment. About the only thing we can really conclude is VR isn't doing gangbusters. Relative performance is very much an unknown.

That's basically the state of VR analysis these days. Too little information combined with rampant internet biases means that anything goes WRT virtually all information regarding VR sales and uptake at the moment.

The analysts likely have access to the most "accurate" information, but there's no way of knowing just how accurate or more importantly how complete their information is. They might have 100% accurate information from X number of retailers, for example, but that may not accurately correlate to the market as a whole. Especially when you consider the relatively low volumes of hardware being moved by all 3 major players.

Regards,
SB
 
We only know that in Japan apparently Sony can't keep up with demand. But how on purpose that is I don't know. I think you can walk into most European stores and find plenty, so there at least it does not seem to be a supply issue.
 
I finally tried a Rift. My local Best Buy is running a demo now. I was surprised how low resolution the displays appeared. Even my non-techie girlfriend immediately commented on the lines in the helmet displays. We did some dreamscene things (alien, then on top of a building, then dino museum) and the Crytek-powered climbing demo. Interesting.

I think it would be really fun if you could do the full room setup (Vive right?) so you can wander fairly freely. Otherwise it seems pretty gimmicky. And looking at the software selection on Steam is a rather sad experience.

PS4 has some interesting exclusives.
 
Last edited:
I finally tried a Rift. My local Best Buy is running a demo now. I was surprised how low resolution the displays appeared. Even my non-techie girlfriend immediately commented on the lines in the helmet displays. We did some dreamscene things (alien, then on top of a building, then dino museum) and the Crytek-powered climbing demo. Interesting.

I think it would be really fun if you could do the full room setup (Vive right?) so you can wander fairly freely. Otherwise it seems pretty gimmicky. And looking at the software selection on Steam is a rather sad experience.

PS4 has some interesting exclusives.

Rift can do roomscale with 3 sensors. The play area is somewhat smaller than vive but still good enough.
 
VR golf in early access. Requires roomscale, works both on vive and rift

The Golf Club VR is built off the foundation laid by HB Studios’ original award winning game released in 2014, The Golf Club, taking advantage of the original game’s stunning visual presentation and over 130,000, two kilometer² procedurally and user-generated courses

http://store.steampowered.com/app/489600/

and another vr golf game
Mechanically, it’s a forgiving game. Since you’re not holding an actual club hitting an actual ball, there is some flexibility given to the accuracy and power of your swing. It’s not quite Wii Sports Golf levels of leeway, but it doesn’t require you to be a professional to have fun either.
https://uploadvr.com/vr-golf-online-game-review/
 
You do realize steam is fairly open in its nature on purpose? The requirements for games in steam are clearly presented. If you try to buy something you don't have hardware for you will get a popup saying that hey, you need x&z to use this title, are you sure you want to proceed buying? There is no way to accidentally buy a game you don't have hardware for, at least not anymore than trying to load xbox game on ps4 from disc and complaining that game doesn't work even though the disc fits.

Oculus store is not open. That is a big negative to me and a reason why I don't buy anything from oculus store that I can get now or possibly later from steam.
In what way is the occlusion store less open than Steam?

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk
 
In what way is the occlusion store less open than Steam?

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk

Oculus store only sells content for Oculus products. Steam does not sell only products for vive.

Oculus purchase often does give you steam key but why bother ewhen one can avoid hassle by going straight to steam.
 
Oculus store only sells content for Oculus products. Steam does not sell only products for vive.

Oculus purchase often does give you steam key but why bother ewhen one can avoid hassle by going straight to steam.
Based on your description it would seem like the occlusion store is more specific and more open* compared to Steam.

*Because you can buy Steam content.

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk
 
This is really bringing the discussion forward.

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk

What you claim is like saying like closed source is more open than open source because owner of closed source codebase can use both open and closed source. I'm not going to start to debate sillyness along those lines further.

Steam is much more open and friendly if one ever intends to own something other than oculus vr headset.
 
Back
Top