Hacker News Reader

Comment by bykhun | Hacker News Reader

Really, what a bad time to publish such article. Oculus Quest hit records with its' sales for Christmas, and out of stock for two months ahead.

View on HN

Yeah, the evidence they cite for VR declining seems to be entirely within the space of 3DoF VR, like Google's Daydream and VR video:

> Many big name adopters have abandoned their VR projects. Google recently halted sales of Daydream, its VR headset, admitting that "there just hasn't been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped".

> Meanwhile, the BBC has announced it is ending the funding for its VR hub, less than two years after it was founded.

6DoF VR with tracked controllers (Quest, Valve Index) is a whole different beast, and actually seems to be gaining momentum lately.

> Yeah, the evidence they cite for VR declining seems to be entirely within the space of 3DoF VR, like Google's Daydream and VR video:

If VR were such a hot market surely you would not see the Google Daydream news and Samsung killing off GearVR. You have to take in account all news, positive and negative, to get an actual view of how the market is doing. And also the investment. And investment in VR has been in the decline for a couple of years now after an initial peak.

To me, Google killing off Daydream and Samsung killing off GearVR is akin to TV manufacturers killing off their black-and-white TV models because everyone has moved on to colour.

Holding your phone in front of your eyes with some glass inbetween is a bit of a difference to a real VR Headset.

And don't ignore how active the porn industry is in the VR space.

Do you expect porn to bring VR mainstream?

Also, Valve will release Half-Life: Alyx [1] in March 2020. It's the first game in the much-loved HL series released since Portal 2 in 2011.

I don't own a VR headset and I don't intend to any time soon - it's too expensive and nothing looks enjoyable enough to justify the cost. But once enough big-name games like Alyx get released, gamers previously on the fence (like me) will start to purchase VR headsets, and VR will eventually become the new gaming platform that publishers wants to release on.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

> and VR will eventually become the new gaming platform that publishers wants to release on.

I predict the opposite. It will sell a few headsets maybe (a peak), but that alone will not change the course of the technology at all in 2020. Plus, Half Life's popularity in 2020 has nothing to do with its popularity 20 years ago.

It pretty much stole social media headlines with just a post saying "tune in a few days for our next VR game". Valve have plenty of clout still, and Half-Life still draws plenty of eyes.

Social media fanatism or outrage hardly reflects the market as a whole.

The Oculus quest is 400$, that's a pretty fair price imo (and it is amazing).

So they say, anyway. It's best to take any Valve announcements about actual games with a grain of salt.

Some YouTube streamers that I watch did a big run of VR games over the past year or so, and without exception they were gimmicky experiences that would have been better with a more conventional setup. Of course needing the equivalent of a GTX 1080 is a big barrier too.

My prediction is that when and if this new Half-Life game comes out, there won't be enough of a user-base actually using VR gear to sustain it; I hope that they have planned for that case and will release it as a normal PC shooter as well.

Valve has started taking money for the game and given a concrete release date. I think you can count on it actually being released with little if any schedule slippage.

coughcough duke nukem forever coughcough

Yeah, I'm not even a gamer, but a relative got a Quest for Christmas, I tried it, and I was like "OK, this is pretty awesome." Without being too cliche it felt like the holodeck to me. Could easily imagine me playing games on it frequently, let alone a true gamer.

> Oculus Quest hit records with its' sales for Christmas

I hope it's a lot more than 400 000 units (see https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb...) because that's not a large number at all compared to all other gadgets sold at the same time.

Sold 1.6 million in 2019. Compare that with the switch, that sold 12 million in 2019.

A first gen product has more than 10% of the sales of a eight gen product? That's absolutely amazing. I expected it to be a failure because it has limited performance.

How is the quest 1st gen? There have been headsets for VR for quite a while already, including phone-based VR prior to that, so it's hardly a "first gen" product at all unless you narrow down the definition to mean exactly what you want it to mean.

Most people in the VR industry would strongly argue (myself included) that the Quest is the first legit attempt at a consumer VR headset. Before the Quest I never told anyone to go out and buy a VR headset. Now, if they ask, I recommend buying it. The one rough edge with the Quest is the weight. If they knock it down a few ounces I'd argue the Quest is basically the MVP for some startup to create a breakout killer app for VR.

What killer app for VR though? It is not like nobody tried to do VR games yet. The lack of any real worthy software after years of developing games is a sign that it is probably far from obvious that VR games will be a thing beyond a gimmick.

Quest may as well be the first VR headset ever, PC VR was never ever going to take off. Normal people don't want tower PCs in their homes in 2020 and VR needs 6DOF headset and controller tracking to actually be good anyway.

Silly to compare it to literally the most prolific games console manufacturer ever.

So... hardly a failure for a comparatively very recent and unmature product

Reply on news.ycombinator.com