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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Valve are the ones who have dropped the ball. They had all the cards lined up. Killer IP that would make people buy hardware if used correctly (HL3, Portal 3). Probably the best tech currently available (Vive). The biggest PC gaming storefront (Steam). Their own OS. Each and every one of these components, with the exception of Steam, was neglected. They had the future of PC gaming right there ready to grab... and did essentially nothing with it. It may not be too late but I think Valve needs an organisational restructuring if they want to pick up their pieces. If they don't it's very likely that they loose most of their revenue in the next 10 years, because even Steam needs killer exclusive content, i.e. content that cannot be licensed on another online platform, which soon will only be Valve games.

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It's beginning to appear clear that FPS is VR's pipe dream. The locomotion part seems non-trivial to solve and dissonance between the virtual and real world renders VR FPS completely unplayable for a large amount of gamers (it can make you feel incredibly uncomfortable, can also cause motion sickness.)

HL3 and Portal 3 would be incredibly difficult to implement well in the VR space, and I feel this is something that Valve understands much better than many others.

What would excite me about VR is a game like Morrowind. While it is first person, it's not exactly a shooter. The only teleportation is fast travel, but that could even use a World of Warcraft style where instead of teleporting you just ride the animal to get there.

Put me in a foreign world with several varied environments. Let me explore it without artificial restrictions. The combat could be minimized with most potential enemies being non-aggressive by default (a change to Morrowind's mud crabs or cliff racers). For this style of game I would even expect to still have to use a controller both for combat but also for inventory management, etc.

> can also cause motion sickness

This is a real issue, and was my exact experience with VR. I know VR devs are aware, and have addressed it in some ways. But, idk. I was ready to plop down the cash for a Vive, but decided against it after a test run.

You know it goes away right? For all the hate in this thread, I am still in love with my vive. The motion sickness is a problem at first, but your body eventually adapts- took about 2 weeks for me, now I never get motion sick what-so-ever.

IMO these franchises have one big advantage: They are in a science fantasy setting that has already introduced the concept of teleportation. So there is already precedent for teleporting around the map, making locomotion unnecessary.

Teleportation is a garnish, not the main dish. Traversal mechanics are a core part of most action related games.

I don't play an FPS to teleport around. I play to run, jump, dodge, etc.

Don't call it FPS then. Have you played Portal?

Portals main mechanic is movement, portals are created to enable new venues of movement. If portals were simply point at somewhere and click to teleport there the game would hardly be portal anymore and probably not fun at all.

Yes, I have played Portal and think that there is still enough movement involved to be problematic for VR as it's done now.

Sure, you could invent a teleportation-specific genre, but I think it'd be quite the niche.

Have Valve/etc gone after the hardcore F1/racing market? I have various friends who follow F1 closely and generally have money to spend. Surely VR works well for seated-racing games.

- Cheap omnidirectional treadmills

- Haptic touch feedback through gloves

These are the final two pieces, in my opinion. Well those and making the hardware smaller.

Can't the locomotion problem be solved by putting the player character in a wheelchair or some sort of mobility assistive device?

Wheelchair Deathmatch. Sounds fun, I would totally play that in VR.

I visited the Valve offices about two years ago, and almost 2/3rds of the company was working on VR. I think right now they're aware that the current iteration of hardware isn't good enough for the common consumer, and in addition there's no real AAA content out for it. VR really needs it's own Breath of the Wild kinda game to go along with the hardware if they want it to sell. I suspect what we'll see is a new version of the Vive released alongside a major AAA title by Valve at some point, but being Valve they want to ensure that they release it when it's done, not when the timing is right.

VR is at iPhone 3GS. I'm waiting for 4S.

You say that like it's easy. Like they didn't try or are not trying.

The truth is, you don't know what they tried, and failed. You don't know what resources they got at their disposal. Especially considering all the stuff they are doing right now and how hard the competition is.

And worst, given the exceptional track record of Valve, you choose to believe in a theory ignoring it.

Your comment read like you are just disappointed to not have your pony yet and want to blame one of the best pony breeder for your frustration.

I suspect the loose management style of Valve has this effect. Great ideas, no one to drive them home. Something that works great for keeping your employees happy, but works only as long as you have a dominating market position.

There might be another way of looking at this in that perhaps with a distributed management style the costs become more apparent. With a centralised style you can take a "five year plan" style approach and swallow all the upfront costs but where you have a bunch of separate cost centres each with their own P&L it's harder to find one single personality to drive things forward.

It might seem that I'm saying that if they had a more centralised style they might have made more progress but I don't think that's the case since when we look around at other more driven companies we aren't seeing too many breakthroughs either.

There are two fields where I know for a fact VR has made significant inroads in the last few years they being Gaming and Design Visualisation. The latter being where a VR rig is a worthwhile business expense. The former being my PS 4 where there seems to be plenty of content available, but the €600 price-tag is just a little out of my reach...

I'm a well-paid (some would say over-paid) professional and I'm quibbling about the cost of the rig and I just wonder are we at a point where the economics stack up for widespread adoption of the technology? Not just in terms of the gear but the R&D costs for game developers, such as Valve, with a questionable rate of return ..

> Valve needs an organisational restructuring

There's nothing to restructure.

Who says that the future of gaming is VR? For me the future of computing including gaming is AR. VR is just an halfway technology that can't do any of the things that AR can. And I don't think that an halfway tech can ever be the future.

Self driving car are the future of automobile. Self driving is not even halfway to GAI, yet it is the future.

People taking this VR/AR stance don't understand at all what goes into such tech. Like somebody spitting on the explosion engine because "that's only a halfway technology" and refusing to drive anything but flying cars.

AR, or more appropriately Mixed Reality, is rumoured to see the light in 2019, so it's less than 2 years. VR is simply pointless as of now and the sale figures reflect this dire reality. Your comparison with the ICE is completely wrong. A more accurate one would be to go on a ship vomiting everything in your stomach when currently you can go by car across a bridge taking more time and in less than 2 years there will be a ship that doesn't make you vomit.

It makes little sense to say that AR will render VR pointless. They have fundamentally different purposes - AR (as stated in the name) adds your existing reality, while VR replaces it entirely. If you're playing a game, AR would put a monster in your living room, while VR would put you in a completely virtual environment.

Also, what do you mean AR is rumoured to see the light? AR already exists; see Hololens, META, and others. Magic Leap has developed interesting prototypes but has failed to develop any unique practical consumer implementation.

Hololens, Meta and the others are only Dev kits with general consensus for a consumer version in 2019. I would like to see any reliable source for your Magic Leap statement. As far as I know the rumours currently put a Magic Leap dev kit announcement by the end of this year. And there is already a product equivalent that has been successfully demoed to the board on February. And as for your first point you can do VR with an AR device, you can't do the opposite. And the AR part is the most important experience that will permit you to bring your device everywhere. With VR you will be confined to a room without any movement possibilities in an uncontrolled environment.

http://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-magi...

Magic Leap is certainly capable of releasing a dev kit, but it will not feature most of the technologies present in their prototypes.

Yes, AR and VR can be combined into a single device, and that will most likely be the way to mainstream commercial success in the future, but at present, current headsets offer an incomparable experience in terms of immersion and pure enjoyment. Have you tried the Vive or Oculus with touch controllers? Being tethered to a gaming PC allows for much higher graphical performance than a mobile device.

I see no reason for such animosity towards VR. Saying that current VR devices are pointless because VR will be later combined with AR devices is like saying the Palm Pilot was pointless because its functionality would be later included with smartphones.

(I would argue that the end-goal of VR is actually quite divergent from AR; the future of VR would be the Matrix, where your mind itself is in a completely simulated environment. In the mean time, we make do with the Vive.)

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