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Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

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/

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> 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

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