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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Just the reality that headsets like Quest are the true future of VR, PCVR is an evolutionary dead end a very small percentage of people who can afford them want a gaming PC tower in their home, PCVR is a fraction of a fraction of percentage.

I own both and demoing my Rift on a high spec system my friends were blown away and the first question was "Can it run on my macbook?" Then thats where the idea of owning VR died for them.

Demoed my Quest and one person bought one within 2 minutes of taking the headset off, took his to a family BBQ and two more people there bought it after trying it for a few minutes.

I still enjoy many PCVR games but this is just reality.

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> PCVR is an evolutionary dead end a very small percentage of people who can afford them want a gaming PC tower in their home, PCVR is a fraction of a fraction of percentage.

PCVR is no more niche than the demographics for Far Cry 5. If you have the hardware to run a modern AAA game on PC, all you're really missing at that point is the headset. And I don't see Ubisoft refusing to make games for PC because there are too few people with powerful enough PCs. As GPU tech continues to develop and higher performance reaches lower price points, it'll also become more accessible to more people. Though you can already pay 200-250 Euros for a decent GPU now and it'll be more than sufficient for VR gaming.

Far Cry 5 runs on mid range PC, high end PC, PS4 and Xbox One and it's funding would have relied on the combined profits of all those installs.

High end PC is a small fraction of those installs.

PCVR capabilities are too high for it to be a dead end. More niche, absolutely, because mobile VR/AR has somewhere from console to smartphone-level growth potential--but a smaller, higher-paying market for premium experiences is going to continue.

It's unlikely that PC will ever be mass market, but when/if VR makes more in roads in productivity applications PC will be key. There is a lot of promise in art creation, game development and 3D content creation, and of course HN's traditional programmer dream of infinite terminals, but the real killer app is telepresence for remote meetings. All of those use cases need better software and hardware

>There is a lot of promise in art creation, game development and 3D content creation

Absolutely agree with this, literally anyone who can use the headset is able to sculpt a 3D model in Oculus Medium that resembles what they want. Same can't be said for any non-vr 3D modelling software, huge potential in the creative industries.

Still niche and not mainstream though.

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