Is VR going to die because of no software?

[manux]

There is such a big fundamental difference between gimmicks like 3dtv/kinect/wii/eye toy and vr. People saying vr will fail because of kinect to my mind suffer from confirmation bias.

It's impossible to explain high end vr, it must be experienced. You get presence on rift where you feel anxiety and sweating in horror games, primal fear of heights at the top of the building,...

Not sure about move but oculus touch achieves roomscale with absolutely perfect location and orientation. You will get hand and scale presence that makes your brain believe you really are there.

Grabbing and manipulating virtual objects works via 1:1 mapping of your hands and head. No lag, no gestures and no gimmicks.

There is plenty of games. Just this week as touch launched rift got 50+ new titles out of which good portion is quality content.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

By the way, I think few platforms had this good a software launch, if any.

A good software launch? Most of the titles on PSVR (Vive and Rift as well) are glorified tech demos with very little game play. That's been one of the major complaints I've heard from people I know with each of the headsets (Rift, Vive, and PSVR). Combined with the price of said titles for the amount of content provided, it's been a huge disappointment to many of them although there have been some promising titles on each platform (VR pinball is quite compelling for people that like Pinball, and I've heard good things about that one Mech arena battle game on PSVR).

It's also why most of them can't in good conscience advise other people to jump in unless they have money to burn. For some of them, their Rift and Vive are already serving as expensive paper weights. Many of those same people picked up the PSVR as they still believe that VR is the future. But they feel the same way about PSVR and are afraid that in a month or two, it will also just serve as a paper weight in their household. I expect there will be many PSVR adopters who are new to VR that end up feeling the same way in a few months once the novelty starts to wear off and they realize that most game experiences will end up being quite limited.

The recent launch of Oculus Touch has gotten many of them to dust off their Rift headset again, I'm going to be interested to see if that materially changes anything for them.

Regards,
SB

 

[Globalisateur]

The Wii and Kinect both had as good a software platform launch as PSVR.

Don't know for Kinect but I vehemently disagree for the Wii. What did the Wii had except Wii Sports (meta 76) and Red steel (meta 63) at launch (really using the motion controls) ?

Compared to Wii the PSVR had an exceptional software list at launch IMO.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I own an indie platformer called Bound, and a god-simulator / RTS called Tethered. Bound cost me 15€ and Tethered was 23€ I think.
Both are good games and neither was expensive.

Robinson is a full-blown VR adventure game from Crytek which I'll probably own as soon as it comes down in price, and Resident Evil 7 is hardly a "glorified tech demo".
With the overwhelmingly positive reception the X-Wing Rogue One demo is getting, VR mode for vehicles is definitely coming back in full force come Battlefront 2 in late 2017.

 

[BRiT]

Don't know for Kinect but I vehemently disagree for the Wii. What did the Wii had except Wii Sports (meta 76) and Red steel (meta 63) at launch (really using the motion controls) ?

Compared to Wii the PSVR had an exceptional software list at launch IMO.

Those 2 software titles were more than enough to drive sales of Wii to unprecedented levels, tens of millions of sales. Is that not the definition of a good software platform for launch?

 

[BRiT]

Yes, VR is a nifty experience now, but that's all it is now. Yes I have tried it and it is impressive but it is nothing more than an expensive gimmick at this point in time. I look forward to the future of it, which is more of Mixed-Reality/Augmented-Reality but have no interest in the current VR experience. I will be waiting for the future of it, Hollodecks.

I just don't see it as catching on in the US outside a small group of "techies" and early adopter experimenters because normal people fundamentally hate wearing glasses or anything extensive that requires cables and any sort of setup time over a minute.

 

[Davros]

We are still sat in front of TVs playing controller-based games.

How dare you

 

[Arwin]

Tethered is definitely on my list to try. Bound is a required title to play in VR for anyone on this forum, basically, who has a passion for rendering tech and or the demo scene. It's wonderful. I'll make a short video of the VR store page right now. Plenty of really good games that are perhaps obscured by being cheap, but are great stuff regardless and full of actual great gameplay and depth.

Robinson is perhaps a bit too short for a full priced title though.

And yeah, that X-wing VR chapter for Battlefront definitely converted a lot of skeptics, so I do hope they will make a full AAA game out of it. Still have to try it myself.

 

[manux]

Gran turismo will probably be amazing in vr. Car simulator games fit well vr.

I have mostly lost interest in gaming. My ps4 is collecting dust and only game I played on it this year was uncharted. I do a bit more traditional gaming on pc but not much... vr on the other hand has sucked me in now every day after I got touch and there is still so much more to experience. I'm big believer in vr. It will take time for it to reach mainstream pricepoints. It could be a gimmick but it is such a good gimmick it will keep sucking people in again and again be it a mini game, sports highlights, porn or whatever happens to float your boat.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Didn't know there was a store page. There's some interesting stats there, how invested people are in VR titles. We don't have sales figures, but we do have votes. Assuming the same voting patterns by players regardless of game genre, we get a sort of relative metric. Every PSVR owner no doubt downloads PSVR demo and Playroom. These have 2000 and 2200 votes respectively, so that sets a baseline of 'all PSVR players == 2000 votes'. Against that we can compare other titles.

Batman Arkham VR, 1000 votes. So very popular, high adoption, about half of PSVR owners sort of thing
Battlezone has 77 - so just a few percent of PSVR owners
Waddle Home (£8) has 12 votes
INVASION! (free) has 1500
RIGS (£50) - 101
Super Stardust (£15) - 26
Keep Talking (£12) - 107
How We Soar (£16) - 31
Eagle Flight (£35) - 154
Robinson (£55) - 351
Tethered (£25) - 237
SWBattlefront (free) - 1000

There are some major investments there that have failed (RIGS, Battlezone) and indies that just aren't selling. There's an argument that most VR use at the moment is freebies and people showing off their new experience to friends and family. Someone else with more time could do a full record of titles instead of the semi random sampling I did.

 

[Davros]

Those 2 software titles were more than enough to drive sales of Wii to unprecedented levels, tens of millions of sales. Is that not the definition of a good software platform for launch?

2 titles is not a good software platform, unless your one of those strange people who's default point of view is that of a manufacturer and not an end user.

 

[Globalisateur]

OK let's focus on the relatively successful games using shifty's metrics but I would take the Kitchen free demo as our new base:

- Kitchen VR (free) - 2648 votes

- Batman Arkham VR (€20) - 1104 votes
- Until dawn rush of blood (€20) - 749 votes
- Thumper (€20) - 314 votes
- Tumbles VR (€10) - 254 votes

I would say there is some success to have if the software is good. At €20 max, that is.

 

[BRiT]

2 titles is not a good software platform, unless your one of those strange people who's default point of view is that of a manufacturer and not an end user.

True, but it was enough to drive tens of millions of hardware sales. So how exactly do you measure "good", that is to say what metric should be used? Is it pure enjoyment or similar which is very hard metric to measure? Is it the quantity of titles? Is it the variety of the software genres? It is the number of systems sold by it, which is to say are they "system sellers"? If using 'system seller' metric then Wii was knock out gangbusters success and not just a good software platform but an exceptional software platform that has not been matched by anyone else to date.

 

[hughJ]

I guess "good" for a new platform launch would be a standard judged by past examples which eventually grew into self-sustaining ecosystems where the platform holders and content creators profited and consumers satisfied with their value for dollar. One would need to dig up the first year sales history of past emerging platforms and compare. What were the Atari 2600 unit sales and attach rates during its first 9 months? Apple2? NES?

I think a good metric for judging consumer satisfaction with the current VR headsets will be looking at the second-hand market value. We're at a point now where both Oculus and HTC have fulfilled their pre-order backlog 4+ months ago and are able to ship immediately on order. A year ago I was concerned that if the content landscape wasn't very strong by this point that we might end up seeing a flood of used Rifts and Vives for sale, second-hand prices plummeting, and Oculus and Vive forced to cut their prices to keep moving new hardware. Taking a quick look around ebay now though suggests that's not the case - the hardware seems to be holding its value on resale, and the numbers of units being resold seems to be relatively small considering there's maybe a half-million of these things floating around. Maybe people just love $600+ paperweights?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I guess "good" for a new platform launch would be a standard judged by past examples which eventually grew into self-sustaining ecosystems where the platform holders and content creators profited and consumers satisfied with their value for dollar. One would need to dig up the first year sales history of past emerging platforms and compare. What were the Atari 2600 unit sales and attach rates during its first 9 months? Apple2? NES?

I think a good metric for judging consumer satisfaction with the current VR headsets will be looking at the second-hand market value. We're at a point now where both Oculus and HTC have fulfilled their pre-order backlog 4+ months ago and are able to ship immediately on order. A year ago I was concerned that if the content landscape wasn't very strong by this point that we might end up seeing a flood of used Rifts and Vives for sale, second-hand prices plummeting, and Oculus and Vive forced to cut their prices to keep moving new hardware. Taking a quick look around ebay now though suggests that's not the case - the hardware seems to be holding its value on resale, and the numbers of units being resold seems to be relatively small considering there's maybe a half-million of these things floating around. Maybe people just love $600+ paperweights?

A lot of that also has to do with the limited number of units available. With the current install base (units in the wild), there's no potential for a flood of used units. In many ways similar to laser disc, another niche item. Limited quantities and used units never flooded the market.

Add to that many of the early adopters are fervent believers in the future of VR, even if the present incarnation is a disappointment, and are holding onto their units in hopes that the future will bring better things for VR. That doesn't prevent many of them from expressing feelings of disappointment about the current state of VR. Heck, the most recent Co-Optional podcast features them lampooning what is quickly becoming the most prevalent gaming genre on VR in terms of title releases, "room scale" standing in place shooters. They even came up with a derogatory term for it which I can't remember off the top of my head.

That said they are still fervent believers in what VR can bring and continue to hope for improvement in terms of what VR will eventually bring to gaming. Unfortunately, it's just not there yet and they are left jaded with the current experience (Rift, Vive, and PSVR). Each new wave of titles bring fresh excitement, although each new wave of titles features an excitement level lower than the previous wave of titles.

For example, many of them got very excited by the Batman demo on PSVR. But were ultimately extremely disappointed in it due to the shortness of the title. It was a prime example of a glorified tech demo. They would have liked a more fleshed out game, but also wonder if the experience would still hold up in a full length game.

The tech is certainly impressive, but the games that work well in VR are currently very limited making for limited long term appeal. Hopefully that changes.

We'll see in ~3 years whether it was a worse or similar gaming fad to Kinect and Wii (albeit on a lower scale) or if it'll have enough going for it by then to turn it into a longer term gaming staple outside of a niche audience.

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

I think you are looking to the wrong platforms.

Oculus has a bunch of 20-25 hour long games some even more so and I am sure there will be more to come as we move forward. Oculus is investing a lot of into the games and I am sure we will start seeing that pay off. I know valve and htc are also investing. I have no idea what sony will be doing but I am hopefully they will poor at least that much

 

[manux]

For those who like pinball in vr this could be a wortwhile building project... Seems like good fun

Oculus medium. pretty cool

 

[Deleted member 13524]

There are some major investments there that have failed (RIGS, Battlezone) and indies that just aren't selling.

Just a couple of thoughts regarding those two games.

With RIGS, Guerrilla Cambridge almost "perfected" a FPS implementation for seated VR+gamepad by making movement and interaction very comfortable and easy.
And then someone in an executive position and suffering from endless consecutive brainfarts thought it would be a good idea to pick the (hardest to do) interaction mechanics and develop a multiplayer-only game for a platform that had zero userbase on day one. And not happy with that, let's make it not just a classic deathmatch/CTF/domination multiplayer game but instead it'll be a weird football-without-the-ball-but-you-can-shoot-other-players super weird mix that I still couldn't understand by the time I had watched the very long text-based tutorial and tried 5 or 6 matches.
Had they picked up the gameplay elements and made a 5-6 hour-long Mecha single player game, plus some very simple deathmatch multiplayer then this would be selling well, IMO.

Battlezone is a texture-less brainless shooter with several maps but no story or narrative or characters etc..
That's totally okay. But for 40€ this would be a very tough sell, and for 60€ it's ridiculous.
At 25€ this would be on the top 3 PSVR titles for sure.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

For those who like pinball in vr this could be a wortwhile building project... Seems like good fun

Yup that exact Tested video is the only reason I'm remotely interested in VR at the moment, especially after having tried it. I posted at length about it in the Oculus VR thread.

Something like that is right up my alley and building the faux pinball cabinet would be fun. I love pinball, but pinball machines are incredibly expensive. However, that one thing isn't enough to get me to pull the trigger on the current generation of VR when very little else piques my interest. Experiencing VR on a friend's headset over multiple weekends was interesting, but not compelling in and of itself. The content just isn't there for me to want to invest a lot of money (more than ~200 would be pushing it after having tried it). Of course, I'm more limited than most other people as I'm one of those that are sensitive to VR motion sickness.

Oddly enough, however, I'm quite interested in the Oculus touch controllers. They look like they could be very comfortable to use as a controller instead of a console controller for regular games.

Regards,
SB

 

[idsn6]

Most of the titles on PSVR (Vive and Rift as well) are glorified tech demos with very little game play. That's been one of the major complaints I've heard from people I know with each of the headsets (Rift, Vive, and PSVR). Combined with the price of said titles for the amount of content provided, it's been a huge disappointment to many of them...

I think that the industry has been approaching this in the wrong way. VR is a new medium, not a platform, and it may therefore be beneficial to try new approaches instead of attempting to shoehorn in existing assumptions like gameplay and economic models.

Short VR experiences and experiments need to coexist alongside dedicated games, but they also need to be clearly differentiated to manage expectations.

One way to accomplish this, to my thinking, is to model the indie demo selection on a different real-world example: a themepark, or a fair. Instead of forcing users to risk a significant chunk of money on possible disappointment, move to a microtransaction model: perhaps 25¢ to a dollar or two to enjoy the attraction, but importantly, for each time through. For the customer, this dips down into the potentially lucrative impulse-buy price territory, which simultaneously mitigates the problem of buyer's remorse, and it is up to them how much replay value they find thereafter. For the developer, this model can shape and focus their efforts into crafting unique, bite-size, immediately impressive experiences, a few minutes long, with enough of an impact or a hook to leave the customer wanting to come back, or to share it with a friend. This extends naturally to literal on-rails rides, arcade games, and time-limited explorations.

As an example, when I watched Zootopia the introductory train sequence struck me as something that would be ideal as a VR ride: no physical attraction could possibly build an environment of that magnitude, the experience is about the length of a pop song, and there are enough separate things going on to encourage multiple rides while still being satisfying as a one-shot.

To mitigate the pushback from users who are accustomed to paying once to own their software, I believe it would be necessary to access this specific style of attraction through a unified storefront UI that cordoned them off from traditional, high-priced, full-featured games, for the health of both markets, for discoverability, and to minimize confusion. Developers would also need to be convinced to adopt the lower price points for initial access, but the hope is that by reducing consumer friction they will reach many more people, and that that will have knock-on effects in terms of word of mouth and repeat buyers.