People generally agree that VR games are miles ahead of ordinary games in terms of immersion. The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games. The Meta Quest comes close to a decent price point, but there aren't many publishers making elaborate games for it. A chicken/egg situation with regards to adoption and game investment.
Maybe, but focusing on the "exclusive" part -- the one part that is consumer hostile -- seems weird. If there was a standard for VR games, or if a game existed in both Oculus and Vision, it'd be a good thing. Exclusivity is not a good thing.
What does the word "exclusive" mean in this context? What would be a non-exclusive VR game that can be played on a VR headset? What are some examples?
"Exclusive" in games consoles is a loaded word that means "exclusive to this platform and not available anywhere else".
If the intended meaning is what you suggest, then I'd recommend removing the word "exclusive" and just saying "there is no affordable VR console with lots of big games".
An affordable VR console with a lot of big games would be sufficient for VR mass market success, but likely some of those big titles would be automatically exclusive for that console, namely for first party titles. Those would first be made just to get the console off the ground. Sony made "Horizon Call of the Mountain" probably just to sell more headsets, not because they expected to make money with it. The install base is likely too low for that. A third party publisher wouldn't have an incentive to make such a big game. Valve probably also didn't earn anything with Half Life Alyx, they wanted to make their Steam market bigger.
The problem with Valve is that their platform is PCs, and a gaming PC + VR headset is too expensive for most people, who often don't already own a proper PC. The problem with Sony is similar: The PSVR 2 is not a standalone console, but just an add-on to a PS5, and PS5+PSVR2 is too expensive for people who are just interested in VR. It's like trying to sell a Game Boy which requires you to already own an SNES for it to function. It would be a flop.
The Meta Quest 2 is in a better position, it's standalone and rather affordable. But Meta can't support it with big games like Sony or Valve could. Meta doesn't have the expertise and probably also not the will to develop expensive AAA games in order too push Quest sales. They are more interested in the metaverse than in becoming a games company.
Nintendo could perhaps make a successful VR console, but it would require massive investments in AAA titles, which would be very risky for them, given their size. And Sony isn't interested in a standalone system.
Microsoft would be more likely. They have huge cash reserves and can afford to lose large amounts of money until they become profitable, as they've shown with the first XBox. But I they haven't shown any ambitions so far to invest billions into an "XBox VR" console and corresponding AAA games.
>What would be a non-exclusive VR game that can be played on a VR headset?
VRChat, Superhot, Simpleplanes, Flight Sim, Ultrawings, Phantasmagoria, Htiman, Nearly all VR compatible racing games, Rec Room, Euro Truck Simulator, Most VR compatible horror games like Phantasmagoria, etc etc etc.
I do not need to "look it up", I own and play Superhot on the Oculus for example.
What in your knee-jerk reply would you say contributes to the conversation about whether "VR exclusives" are needed for a given platform to succeed?
I'm going to help you by providing the context for this conversation (not written by me, but in the initial comment I was replying to), which is:
> "The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games."
There you go. What do you think "big exclusive games" means in this context? Do you think it means "exclusive" as in "Nintendo exclusive" or does it mean "exclusive" as in "it's designed for VR first, regardless of headset brand"? Or something else maybe?
Isn't that the same as saying "VR videogames"? Assuming we mean good quality, and not a minimum effort port.
I was really impressed by the Oculus "First Contact" (or whatever the one with the robot is called). I wonder by there are so few games that feel like it.
Beat Saber is pretty cool, but what killed it in my family is that you cannot see what the other person is seeing, so it's a bummer when you're not donning the headset. Unlike with a regular videogame, where you can watch the screen even if you're not playing.
Have you tried a Quest? I found the SW on that fixed all neaseau I experienced on earlier headsets and I think the Quest 2 was even better but I don’t recall at this point.
It's very varied by person. My friend used a index on my 4090 dedicated (All other monitors to the 2080ti). Running at full frames on google earth. He puked his guts out 20 minutes later and took about 40 total minutes to recover. I was watching the stats the whole time. He just suddenly went urp right in the middle of mt rainier.
I had just showed him WA state and no ill effects, but I didn't have issues on a pre-release vive prototype or release occulus OG while doing barrel rolls and back flips or movement vluprs.
Ok. But Index is made by Valve and you're using SteamVR. I've always had motion sickness issues with Valve. For whatever reason, Quest's rendering stack has always not made me motion sick. Even with Oculus Link which has what people consider "crazy" latencies, it's not which means that it's ASW and other last rendering corrections that are hiding better all the things that would cause motion sickness.
I have a 3090 with HP Reverb G2 and very high tolerance for motion sickness. I’ve noticed in Elite Dangerous that lower framerates cause less motion sickness. The stuttering between frames makes my eyes/brain not treat the visual motion as “real”.
So I crank up the details to super high and enjoy the awesome rendering detail and save myself from motion sickness.
Elite Dangerous is the only VR app that gives me any motion sickness at all and is also my favorite app in VR so far.
I think everyone can agree that artificial locomotion can be motion sickness-inducing. Which you can quite easily do a lot in Google Earths. The faster the worse.
Incidentally Google Earth has comfort options exactly due to that reason, such as the option to narrow the field of view when moving around. I wonder if that option was enabled?
No, it varies hugely person to person. Plenty of us can do completely disconnected motion in VR and not get any nausea. I could do barrel rolls and "Sliding" movement in VR no problem from day one. For the people who are marginal, software and framerate improvements can help, but those "comfort" settings work by killing immersion. There's also a small portion of people that will never be able to play VR without nausea.
There's no plauible way to allow you to move around the virtual space without moving in the real world and not give many people motion sickness, since by definition that is exactly what triggers it. The better the illusion of immersion, the worse sickness you'll get when your eyes tell you you're moving but your body and inner ear say you're not.
Same experience here. For stationary position games I found it fine, but anything with any kind of walking handled by the controllers it felt awful.
Interestingly I tried out F1 2022 in PCVR mode with it and was surprised to find that didn't make me feel ill. A lot of it comes down to the refresh rate and quality of tracking as its the lag that causes a lot of the nausea.
I think that has more to do with mental framing. Your brain is used to being "in a car" and having weird motion. You also usually have the inside of the car being stationary in your field of vision, meaning your brain can look at that and feel fine that you aren't moving.
You can safely treat “reviewer on YouTube” as “stranger at a bar” in terms of accuracy. They get paid to get clicks, not to deliver accurate or expert advice, and that heavily favors “why don’t they just…?” comments glossing over challenging engineering decisions.
Yeah. Also, the "why don't they just" (use plastic/carbon) came from me, not him. Apple is long known for using metal in places where it unnecessarily increases weight, because it makes a product feel more premium.
How many industrial design projects has he done, though? He doesn’t have any particular expertise in the area so while it’s fair to ask why they picked the trade-offs they did, it’s pretty far-fetched to think one of the best industrial design teams in the world forgot about a primary success factor, especially given how much other effort they made to hit weight targets. Absent someone who’s actually worked in the field saying it’s unnecessary, I’d give the benefit of the doubt and assume that they used aluminum instead of plastic for a good reason.
There are other headsets without metal frame, so we pretty much know this is not necessary. And we also know with certainty that metal absolutely isn't necessary for laptop cases, but Apple still uses metal. The explanation is easy: aesthetics, feel, "haptics".
There are no comparable plastic laptops with similar performance, portability/thiness, battery life, and quietness — metal is rigid, and an excellent heat conductor that contributes to those goals.
Yes, and Apple also sold plastic laptops when they were still on Intel. Apple has repeatedly attempted to sell products with a cheaper chassis (iPhone 5C, Plastic Unibody Macbook) yet their customers preferred metal enclosures.
We don't really know why Apple chose Glass + Aluminum for their headset, but we do know for a fact that:
- 1 Their customers have historically chosen metal and aluminum for their products, and Apple is in the business of building what their consumers prefer.
- 2 Glass and Aluminum conduct heat better than plastic. The 2hr battery suggests thermals are a great consideration where the materials chosen were not just for aesthetics. Perhaps plastic could've worked, but see point #1.
How much do gamers actually value immersion though? Seems to me the satisfaction of solving puzzles or executing strategy and the sort are the real drivers of satisfaction with games. Immersion is nice, but unless the interaction mode provides something novel to enable better ways to play it’s really just a novelty.
In some cases they use it well, like Beat Saber. But how much is that worth to people?
I don't think that price can always be outweighed by other factors. Successful game consoles are always pretty cheap. Only productivity devices can ask for a high price.
I have to agree overall. I enjoyed my Meta Quest 2 but it's sat unused for a while now. There were a few games that really were awesome (Beat Saber, Walkabout Mini Golf, and Breakroom) but the last 2 really only shine with other friends and coordinating a time we can all play isn't the easiest. This doesn't even touch on the motion sickness aspect. The Q2 further hampered by the piss-poor UI/UX on the Q2, it really is astounding how bad it is. Once you are in a game it gets better but joining a party or joining an in-progress game is a roll of the dice. When it works it's almost magical but the failure rate is way too high.
The resolution on the Q2 is also just way too low for certain games, I think a MtG-type game would be super cool on the Q2 (and the games I tried in this vein had /massive/ potential that was thrown away completely due to blurry text). In the ends the Q2 has way too many downsides and not enough upsides to keep me using it. I will be getting a Vision Pro at launch though, the resolution alone almost would sell it for me but the emphasis on AR and productivity are the clincher.
The problem is that the Quest 2 is what everyone bought and it's arguably not a compelling enough experience to encourage people to put it on instead of playing traditional PC/console games. Most people serious about PC gaming eventually upgrade to an Index because it's still the best option at a great price if you have the room for a full-room setup - and these people definitely play at least a few times a month.
I’ve played VR games. They can be a lot of fun and very immersive.
But there are clearly still problems to solve. And some of them do involve hardware capability. Basically for the mass market they’re just not there yet.
The apple headset certainly appears to have significantly more power and capabilities in many ways. It will be interesting to see what pops up.
Though obviously a future version with a lower price will be necessary for it to truly go main stream.
Even with my racing sim rig, I find myself using my curved monitor more than the Quest 2. It's just such a pain to re-calibrate and update the software and tweak my graphics settings every time I want to hop in that I usually just don't bother.
I'd attribute part of that to there being so few games available that you've got a captive audience and limited content.
Meta was proudly boasting about how the Quest 3 will have "Over 500 titles" - thats not something to boast about, it's just highlighting how incredibly poor the platform has been from a developer adoption standpoint.
I agree that so far that is where we've been, but imagine a Sim City or Civilization game on the Vision Pro. THAT would be a ton of fun. I'm sure Sid Meier could make something interesting on it. Frankly, I would love it if Apple would throw money at him to make one of his games on it.
>imagine a Sim City or Civilization game on the Vision Pro. THAT would be a ton of fun.
Why? No, seriously, why? People say this as if it is a given, but how would VR improve a game serious that is built around strategy as it's main selling point. How does VR improve Civ as a game? In fact, there are very few genres and types of games that the immersion VR brings is worth the limitations: Weird controls, isolation, headaches, wearing a mask, expense, physical exertion etc.
I'm so tired of people who don't seem to know anything about either video gaming or VR gaming parroting this empty hype of how VR magically makes all games better.
VR is a peripheral, not an advancement in rendering technology.
The same way a huge TV makes a college football game more fun.
It's a city. I live in a real city. SimCity is this flat set of graphics on a screen. I'd much rather be able to view my city that I created and see what it looks like on a human level.
I get your point, and many things would not be good.
But for me at least, SimCity would be. So would Call of Duty (and I know that because I've played 1st person shooters in VR before on multiple occasions).
One problem to solve is that probably we don't want people to stand for hours and having to walk through the city or the world. They might not have the space at home to do it. They could sit on an office chair and rotate themselves 360°. If they spend 3k on the visor they can spend $100 on a chair. However you don't even have to do that kind of exercise on a screen.
The point is that most games would probably need a special VR controller (not a normal one!), unless they can be played point&click style. But Apple won't include them, so the respective games won't be made in the first place. There aren't even smartphone games which require external controllers, despite the install base of smartphones being orders of magnitude higher than what the sales numbers for the Vision Pro headset will be.
Moreover, making elaborate games like civilization wouldn't be economically feasible even if they could be appropriately controlled by default. The price for the headset is so high that not many people will buy it. Then elaborate games can't sell enough copies in order to be profitable. For example, it seems unlikely that even a success like Half Life Alyx made its development cost back. The hardware install base is too small.
So let's wait again 40 years. 2024 to 2064. But Moore's law will not last that long. The prices per transistor aren't exponentially decreasing anymore.
You can walk up to the walls of the room you are playing in (or bed, or chairs or flower pots or a ball you left on the floor, ouch) but I guess that if this sticks somebody will build a 360° walking pad specifically for games. Meanwhile they can artificially limit how far a player can walk in a straight line. Mazes, small vehicles, etc
But isn't it still the most succesful application of VR?
I don't see another application of VR / AR that will prevent the device eventually gathering dust once novelty has faded. Certainly nothing in the presentation from Apple.
> VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust.
A flop indeed. /s From [0]
"Standalone VR headset Quest 2 from Meta (formerly Oculus under Facebook) has outsold Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles, according to the latest information from the International Data Corporation (IDC)."
> Apple is right to ignore it.
Incorrect.
Apple didn't ignore it because they cannot ignore it. Apple is targeting both gaming and for work just like how the Meta Quest Pro has done so.
VR games? Sure gaming, but I didn't know VR games specifically made so much money.
Either way, if I was gaming, playing a new single player 2D (Last of Us, etc) game on a MASSIVE screen on the Vision Pro seems so exciting. Beat Saber and throwing my hands around? Not so much.
Have you tried a VR "Big screen" experience? It's a massive gimmick. It's not special. The quality of what you are looking at is lower than using a nice monitor, and sitting in some empty environment that hosts this big screen is dumb.
It's impossible for me to try anything because it doesnt exist right now. There is no VR experience that has high resolution. If the resolution was better, it would be great. Don't care about the "environment" Just project it into my living room like a home theatre.
