Silent_Buddha
Legend
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
