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Comment by kendallpark | Hacker News Reader

Of all the gaming companies, Valve makes the most sense to be this heavily invested in VR--given their stake in the PC-industry.

Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it. (Valve is known for their flat structure http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...)

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I'm quite sure it's a happy overlap of both: strategically, Valve needs to either be on top of VR or it would bet the farm on VR failing. If someone like Oculus managed to become The App Store for VR gaming, it would be "Valve over", just like if Microsoft ever managed to make the Windows app store attractive to gamers (or to anyone, unlikely to happen anywhere this side of 2060).

At the same time, key innovations like the lighthouse position tracking system (which seems to be implemented in the Vive) have all the markings of genuine engineering curiosity. Curiosity of the kind that is unlikely to spring from a top-down "let's assign n man-years to VR" decision.

> Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it.

I think it's this. That's the problem with hype waves in majority-ruled organizations. Or I'm wrong and people will soon be sitting in the subway with a VR headset on and playing Fruit Ninja in VR.

Valve doesn't make games that you can play sitting in the subway.

Valve also doesn't make Fruit Ninja, but they were just trying to make a point.

No, but they do profit from it being sold on their platform:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/400760/

Well, technically not the brand name, but hey close enough.

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