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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

> I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative

They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.

Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.

I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.

I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.

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Facebook might be sensing that their market is dwindling as other vendors catch up. They might be trying to extract value why they have the lead.

I honestly have no idea though. I don't get why they're in this space as it doesn't appear from the outside that they're trying very hard.

Selling a loss leader to build mindshare and market share isn't my idea of value extraction as compared to building the base for future value extraction.

If you don't think they're trying very hard though, I'm not sure if you've been following VR particularly much.

Maybe they think the entire market is drying up? The AAA blockbuster everybody thought would make VR mainstream (Half Life) seems to have fizzled with great reviews but not many sales. Maybe Facebook now believes VR will prove to be a bubble and they want to juice it for all they can while they still can.

Not sure this makes much sense. All the top end VR headsets are constantly sold out and require waiting months to get one (Index and soon the HP Reverb G2). People want to play Alyx but they can't.

Also a PC only game is niche enough, no PCVR game will ever make VR mainstream. Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.

The only way to make VR mainstream imo is to offer it at console prices or less and make it standalone, which is exactly what the Quest is doing. It's really unfortunate it requires an FB account. I guess they justify it because Xbox and PS5 both require online accounts too.

>Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.

Ironically, Facebook also acquired Beat Games (who makes Beat Saber) last year and effectively ruined it by intentionally breaking all the mods and custom songs, leaving it a shell of its former glory.

According to steamcharts [1], player counts peaked around July 2019 and have only dwindled since the acquisition (with the exception of two small bumps when the acquisition happened in November). Average player counts are have been cut in half since then, in less than a year.

I have almost 200 hours in Beat Saber, but I haven't played it for almost a year now, now that it's just the same two-dozen songs over and over.

[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/620980#1y

Wait, we can’t do custom songs any more? Then what’s the point of the game?

Because the official beatmaps are pretty damn good?

(Are custom songs really broken? Haven't tried in a month or so)

No doubt about that, but I still enjoy playing to my favorite music much more.

Modders (luckily) keep finding a way. It's just unfortunate for the player that having Facebook as an owner means they need to show more good will in preventing the distribution of custom songs so they don't get held accountable for piracy.

I paid attention to the dev discord servers for a few months after the acquisition when they were churning through new mods when the old ones broke and people gave up on trying to maintain them, but haven't checked it recently. I would expect there's probably working mods still, but it's also probably a lot harder to keep them working over time.

FB's official stance on modding is that they will support mods that don't engage in "piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights". [1]

[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-beat-games-to-facebook...

That's really sad to see. I also found the included songs pretty boring, and without custom beatmaps and scoresaber it's not really very good. I wonder what FB's strategy is here - why cut out the enthusiasts?

I dunno, I feel like it’s reaching saturation. Those that want VR are getting it, but then there’s those of us who are gamers, but forget it’s even a thing until someone mentions it. I am a gamer myself (have a 2080, sitting out the 3000 series), and I honestly don’t want one nor see how it can make gaming more enjoyable for me. So to me it seems like it’s going the same route attempt #1 did in the 90s, there’s some market but not enough.

Well, you need to be open about new experiences. And until I got my first VR headset I didn't know what I missed. Now I feel that having a powerful GPU and playing a 3D game on a flat screen is such a waste.

I have tried VR before

I want to like Alyx, but the hassle of connecting my VR headset to the computer every time I want to play is just too much of a pain.

Simple. Leave it connected.

Joking aside. What headset have you got that takes more than a few minutes to connect?

It’s the Rift, the problem is more that I like to store it somewhere when not in use because headset + controllers + trackers take quite a bit of space on my desk.

Then have to dive behind the computer to connect a HDMI and 3 USB cables (not enough ports on front).

Quest + VirtualDesktop is great untethered experience.

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