What do people want?
It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust.
In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.
Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.
That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
i.e. a fixed forward floating velocity is fine, but whenever it varies you throw up.
They had some rather extreme tests to demonstrate this phenomenon, and no one could last more than a second of one of them (bouncing around in a dune buggy) without tearing the headset off.
I got into VR about six months ago with the Quest 3, and for a moment I wondered if all the talk of motion sickness was overblown, or maybe it didn't bother me. So I boldly downloaded a roller coaster simulator. Literally couldn't do more than about 10 seconds of it, even after setting up the blinders (which also effectively ruin the nominal experience anyhow).
So I do think the experiences are getting better about that over time.
However, the problem is, the resulting limitations are a pretty big deal in terms of game design. The VR industry really, REALLY wants to do first-person shooters. I mean, first person, it's almost right there in the name. But the technology that on paper is the very embodiment of "first person" also can't really do that. I've played a bit of Batman on the headset, with it set to 'normal' motion and navigation, and that rides the line of nausea for me, and Batman is really generally a slowly-moving character. I can't imagine trying to do a high-mobility FPS in the style of Quake 1. None of the "I really want to be a first-person shooter" games I've tried really quite work for me. (Have not tried Alyx, admittedly. Next sale. But even if that works, nobody else is copying it very well.)
So if you think of all the possible games, and then remove from them all the games that induce motion sickness, you've cut out rather a lot. Then you face the problem of, of the remaining games, how many of them are actually improved by VR? For instance, you can make a VR chess game, but beyond the initial "oh wow" of the 3D environment, chess is chess, and if anything the VR controls become an impediment versus the precision of the several paradigms for playing chess with mouse and touchscreen that already exist that are able to just fade away until you are just playing chess without thinking about the interface. The VR interface is always there.
The answer is absolutely not zero. Beat Saber, for instance, sure, nominally it could be done in conventional 3d on a 2d monitor and some motion controls, but the millisecond-by-millisecond kinesthetic experience is certainly a qualitative change in VR. It is The Game for a reason. But for VR to ever be more than just a niche, it is going to have to get to the point where it is nearly transparent. We're talking a "VR headset" that is basically the weight and encumbrance of conventional glasses. Maybe a thin wire that goes to a dedicated battery and external compute. If I had something like a dedicated shoulder pocket for that or something it might not be too bad. And we're a ways away from that still. And even then gaming is going to remain a niche unless someone finds a genre that works in VR, doesn't work well without VR, and basically doesn't involve motion through space, and I've got no more idea what that is than most game developers. I just can't entirely exclude its existence.
I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess.
(I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well.
Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics.
Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective?
I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?
Yes, producing two camera views at a time and at pretty high resolution. You can get away with more resolution compromises on a 2D display sitting a couple feet from your eyes versus VR displays hovering just beyond your eyes.
Or wait, even better: scan lines used to allow crts to do more with less. We should really look into using CRT displays for VR headsets
I think the current real-world version of this is called an "IMAX theater". Not very portable though.
VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming.
I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.
>Look at your hand.
>There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it.
Something like that.
OR
I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen.
OR
People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.
We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation.
We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM
Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.
This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
That's not true at all.
Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible.
Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV.
I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.