Is VR going to die because of no software?

[Karamazov]

VR in not ready and yet Driveclub and RE7 on PSVR may have been my best gaming experiences in the last 15 years or so.
I'm glad Sony took the risk, was definitely worth it.

 

[Ike Turner]

VR in not ready and yet Driveclub and RE7 on PSVR may have been my best gaming experiences in the last 15 years or so.
I'm glad Sony took the risk, was definitely worth it.

I'm certain that many players had awesome experiences using Kinect, eyeToy, VFX1 or even the Nintendo Virtual Boy...this doesn't necessarily translate into successfully established technologies or most importantly be worth it financially for the company/manufacturer.

 

[Karamazov]

i had bought kinect at launch, was fun but not game changer to me, barely played the first week and that was it.
had tried VFX1 at the time, and from what i remember it was pretty bad and not immersive at all.
Sure VR has still a long way to go, but if some big companies don't take the risk it will never go anywhere.
I think PSVR is the best chance for VR in general to grow big in the future, as it's already a very good product and consumer friendly.

 

[ProspectorPete]

With Kinect, the best experiences were the 'promised ones'; the fake stage demo's, fake product videos, and so on. Star Wars on stage, or "Milo The Kinect" a game about a boy with more advanced AI in 2008 than is possible today... All were staged and all were fake. The final home product had +150ms lag, was unreliable, didn't nearly have the same experiences as the advertised ones. In the whole launch lineup or in the following years, there was not a single title outside of Dance Central that could have kept peoples interest after playing it a single time.
Microsoft spent 1 BILLION US dollar on marketing Kinect (producing all the fake videos, bribing OPRAH to give it away for free, and so on)

Compare that to PSVR. PSVR is real, it's a real product, it has real, compelling, worthwhile games that you can come back to. It works as advertised (better even).

Kinect sold 24 million copies based on lies. Look at all E3 and reveal footage. it's even better and far more advanced than Kinect for Xbox One. I say this as a former Xbox fan.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Your narrative is out of place on B3D. The arguments are applicable to other devices that won't come under your MS conspiracy theories. I bought EyeToy and loved it and looked for an awesome future in camera games. I bought PS3's PSEye (which Sony presented a lot of lies about in a promo video?) but the idea was dead by that point. There were a few small camera games at launch and Eye of Judg(e)ment and that was that for camera based gaming. I also loved the idea of motion controls and imagined amazing things happening enabling intuitive controls based on how people actually moved their hands while playing, which is where the idea came from, but that idea was pretty still-born even with motion controls as standard in every one of tens of millions of PS3 controllers.

Both were real (every bit as real as Kinect, which sold 15 million units over two years - were all those people duped from MS's launch campaign??). EyeToy had real, compelling, worthwhile games you could come back to. It worked as advertised. If frittered out. Same with Wii in a big way.

It has yet to be proven that the general populace are wanting to invested notable sums of money on a headset based experience. It's proven that people love the experience, but not that they'll want to engage it in long term or while it's pricey. It could be that after the joys of VR for a year, most gamers' habits prefer to slob in front of the TV with a controller because it's all round more chilled and low key. VR might end up like a board game, the fancy show-piece you pull out for parties and family get togethers. Or not. No-one really knows. Importantly though, we're not hearing MS-like stats of n million hours spent in virtual worlds, and we have anecdotal evidence of VR owners barely using it since the initial first novel experiences. So it's absolutely not a sure-fire thing, just like other products that have had potential whether that potential was realised or not.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There are no numbers, and reading a thing on the internet doesn't make it true. 50k sold in 9 months seems unrealistic. Many different arguments can be made although obviously the numbers are fairly low which is why we don't have any. We have one vague detail that Vive is outselling OVR 2:1 (Time Sweeney). So a conservative 200k OVRs would be 400 Vives, and some numbers put them at 700k a whiles back.

Yeah, numbers are all over.

According to CCS Insight as of Feb. 2017

http://www.ccsinsight.com/press/com...r-virtual-reality-headsets-after-a-slow-start

They estimate ~1.2 million dedicated headsets were sold in 2016. That's down from the 2 million they had estimated at the start of 2016.

Using some finger waggling and correlating with the data from Superdata

http://www.ibtimes.com/psvr-vs-vive...most-one-million-playstation-vr-units-2498352

~243k Oculus Rift and ~420k HTC Vives in 2016. That'd be ~537k PSVR in 2017. That would fit relatively well with a production allocation that expects 1 million VR devices by April of 2017. If they ramped up their production orders after initially selling out during the holiday months of 2017, and the demand was still there, I could easily see them selling another ~378k units in the first part of 2017 to reach the 915k number released by Sony.

That seems reasonable WRT 2016 numbers using very rough ballpark numbers. However, while demand for PSVR remains strong currently, demand for Rift and Vive is likely significantly lower so their 2017 sales would be significantly lower during the first part of 2017 compared to the PSVR.

I'll be more interested to see what the sales are like for PSVR after a year has passed. I still think that the novelty will be enough to sustain it for 1-2 years, but I don't see it continuing much beyond that.

I had previously though that Rift and Vive would also be able to sustain 1-2 years, but I'm extremely doubtful now. Sales have basically fallen off a cliff for them. For HTC Vive, it's due to the lack of quality games and a HUGE flood of crap shovelware VR games and experiences. For Oculus, while they have a decent stable of games, bad word of mouth on the internet plagues them for no good reason. And for a technology that requires large investment and buy in from early adopters, that's not a good thing for either of them.

It'll be interested to see if Valve's commitment to creating 3 actual VR games will be enough to revive the PC VR scene. Or if Microsoft helping to introduce low cost VR to the PC will help revive it.

Regards,
SB

 

[Ike Turner]

It's always mind boggling when people can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that something in it's current form isn't going to be as successful as they think/hope/dream...So let me repeat things one more time: VR in it's current form is never going to go mainstream. And it's certainly not Sony's PSVR who's going to change anything at all especially when out of the 3 big products it's technically the worst and by far: Lowest screen resolution, god-awful tracking, tethered to under-powered consoles (same will apply to Scorpio) etc. As a matter of fact Sony is the company that did the least to advance the tech out of all the players out there. Their experience in HMDs (The MHZs line of products) helped them be quick to the market when the buzz around VR started to grow. They fr@kin' repurposed the crappy 6 years old Move controllers and PS4 Camera (which was originally meant to be their half-assed attempt to counter Kinect V2 in case that thing took off) while Valve came out with the most robust tracking system to date and even Oculus made the effort to build a serviceable tracking system (which is still vastly inferior to the Lightouses but at least get's the job done and the Touch controllers are a step up in ergonomics compared to the Vive's one). Sony didn't even bother and said "fuck it let's get this shit out ASAP as we still have a fuck-ton of unsold PS4 Cams and Moves. Was it a bad thing? Hell no! Tons of players are enjoying a passable VR experience for the first time and that's never a bad prospect. But then again...everybody knows that the end-game is untethered Mixed-Reality headsets with inside out tracking. They've all said it, Valve, Oculus (who has shown a prototype already), Microsoft, Apple, Google...Anyway, this is when "VR" is goin to go full "iPhone" in terms of democratization. As off right now it's just a cool gimmick in the grand scheme of things and we are still 5 to 6 years away from the big break. IIRC Microsoft has even ditched it's HoloLens V2 and went straight to V3 which won't probably be out before 2019 because the jump from V1 to V2 wouldn't have been big enough in terms of technological advancements and their direct "competitor" is as good as dead (Magic Leap).

Anyway, this is just to say that Sony selling 900K in 4 Months or HTC/Oculus selling maybe a 800k in a year doesn't change anything at all. Whether they sell or not the movment is already going fullstream because this a the future and the big Corps (MS,GOOG,APPL, FB, Qualcomm) are pouring tons of $$ in R&D to be the first to come out with the first Mixed Reality HMDs that can light the world on fire. VR is just a vector to this..just like Kinect is what made HoloLens possible etc..

 

[xz321zx]

But then again...everybody knows that the end-game is untethered Mixed-Reality headsets with inside out tracking. They've all said it, Valve, Oculus (who has shown a prototype already), Microsoft, Apple, Google...Anyway, this is when "VR" is goin to go full "iPhone" in terms of democratization.

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." - George S. Patton

That's some hefty conjuring mojo for the most part IMHO. Conjuring in hope of public acclaim.

 

[ProspectorPete]

Btw Valve fired Jeri Ellsworth, and Valve believes in mixed reality so much, that they didn't even bother to file patents for all the AR work which was developed by people on their payrol, during working hours..

The fired developers literally got to keep everything because Valve literally did not give a sh*t about it.

 

[tuna]

Some of the sales for PC VR is not for games but for other commercial applications. My company has something like five headsets and we have no game software.

All PSVR sales are to consumers who are interested in games (and other VR entertainment experiences).

 

[digitalwanderer]

Some of the sales for PC VR is not for games but for other commercial applications. My company has something like five headsets and we have no game software.

All PSVR sales are to consumers who are interested in games (and other VR entertainment experiences).

Sounds like a niche market.

 

[ProspectorPete]

Some of the sales for PC VR is not for games but for other commercial applications. My company has something like five headsets and we have no game software.

All PSVR sales are to consumers who are interested in games (and other VR entertainment experiences).

That makes the PC situation even worse