Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

I totally agree with everything you've written, but I'd just put forth that I think what Apple did with Apple Watch could be instructive here.

Apple Watch was basically originally marketed as a high-end app/notification device (remember the original 10k gold Apple Watch?) Over time they realized the real target market and use case was as a fitness/health tracker, and they doubled down on features and design for that.

With these AR/VR headsets, I agree that gaming is the one use case I've actually seen these headsets be great at, but all these companies keep trying to extend it to our daily lives that nobody seems to really want. But I could believe Apple would eventually come around to seeing one or two really good target markets (gaming and watching movies maybe?) and then just really hone in on that. Folks say games will be a tough sell because Apple isn't really known as a gaming platform, but I don't think this is really true if you take iOS games into account. I can easily see game developers wanting to build for this given the hardware capabilities.

No one is going to buy a $3500 headset for their puzzle and idle games, so Apple's existing games market is not going to help them sell this device.

For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.

Good point imo. In the Serious Gamer contingent, you’re perceived as being basically wheelchair-bound if you try to play any major title PC game on a Mac, regardless of its basic capability of running said game.

It’s similar to how many coders will scoff at someone running Windows, pointing out Mac’s higher quality ergonomics, nix OS, and overall friendliness to common dev tools. In recent years the gulf has closed a lot with Microsoft making solid gestures toward dev-ex, but the perception remains.

That said, Apple’s resistance to reaching out into the Serious Gamer market has always confused me, but as a Not Serious Gamer it’s very likely that I don’t really understand the engineering difficulties that they’d face in making those inroads (other than the fact that Mac products are seemingly modification-immune, and the Serious Gamer contingent avoids that mindset like cholera).

Did you not watch the keynote where they highlighted that Unity is a development partner?

I saw that but it doesn't help change my mind. A lot of fun PC games are made with Unity, but not the kind that really benefit from the immersion of VR [0]. Meanwhile, at the end of last year they merged with ironSource—a mobile ad platform—which suggests Unity continues to see their future as being focused on mobile and F2P.

It's possible that Apple will once again define the market, but choosing Unity is not good evidence they've correctly identified the VR games market that's already there.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-W...

I’m less concerned with the “VR Games as a market segment” and more concerned with the “all video games will eventually, essentially be AR/VR” concept.

Like you I’m less than convinced that Apple knows what they’re talking about/doing with Unity, but time will tell.

> For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.

I have no idea if Vision Pro will ultimately be successful, but I'd easily bet that game developers would be willing to come on board. Is there anyone that really disagrees that this is the most impressive piece of consumer VR tech to be released so far? Wouldn't game devs be chomping at the bit to put that technological power to use?

The current generation of VR has been around for a decade now and the large studios have been very anemic towards it so far.

And with Apple, that difficulty is compounded. The company’s greatest success with games has been the casual mobile market, mostly with indie devs and indie studios. Apple and AAA don’t really gel.

I worked at a games company that only made casual games and we had individual users who spent more that $3500 per month, admittedly not many, but more than one.

I'm not saying that casual gamers don't have the cash, I'm saying that casual games almost by definition won't benefit from an immersive experience. People aren't going to go out and spend $3500 to play Candy Crush in the air. Well, not enough to make this device take off.

Those casual games are addiction machines, that are effectively casino games without payouts. The folks paying that much have addictions.

Relatively few folks will spend $3500 on a device unless they think they're going to use it frequently.

But an Apple Watch is still a watch. Even though though first watch kind of sucked it still did what every other watch did and 90 percent of the time you just wore it and ignored it.

You can’t ignore this thing. If it isn’t offering utility 100 percent of the time you are using it you are going to take it off and set it aside.

> You can’t ignore this thing. If it isn’t offering utility 100 percent of the time you are using it you are going to take it off and set it aside.

Isn't one of its new innovative features the ability to turn the display transparent so you can still interact with the real world without having to take the whole thing off?

I can only imagine a sci-fi scene where regular people go to the supermarket with this strapped to their heads.

Plus no matter how good its response time is, I’m sure it is not completely seamless compared to your eyes — noise cancellation alone can make you lose contact with quite a big part of reality, let alone a whole filtered view. Even in the video it was mostly used stationarily.

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