$$$
PCs are expensive. You spent ~$1500 on a good uptodate setup. Now a Valve Index will cost another $1000. Not worth it for the niche.
PCs are expensive. You spent ~$1500 on a good uptodate setup. Now a Valve Index will cost another $1000. Not worth it for the niche.
PSVR only requires a playstation 4 or 5 (depending on PSVR or PSVR2)
High end PC VR is expensive, yeah - but it's not been the only or even main choice for a while now.
Besides even the very top end headsets are still pretty early in terms of tech. Extremely narrow tunnel vision FoV that doesn't even come anywhere close to the 210 degrees required for full human vision, pixels visible on most and if they aren't you'll need an incredibly expensive rig to run those crazy resolutions at 90 fps. Games are also really pricey for what you get since they're targeting a niche market which by definition has to be loaded to be able to afford the setup anyway and has a sunk cost to justify. It's the console experience on PC. Plus you need to mount the trackers and find a way to manage that big fat cable for the headset, it's just piles and piles of expensive hassle for what's mostly still a gimmick.
I'm pretty sure it'll be pretty good a few generations of headsets in the future though, especially once on-the-level PC performance becomes more affordable and the game UX best practices improve. I'm glad the VR games industry is at least moving away from the dumb mandatory teleporting thing and letting people walk around normally now.
The most popular games consoles are the phones everyone has already, because they do other things, the game playing is effectively free. Not to mention that the games themselves have an upfront cost of $0 as well.
"Free" is hard to beat.
And you can't the graphic quality of a mobile game or need a extra PC to stream your content.
I also don’t understand people’s aversion to Meta over Google, Amazon, etc. but that’s a personal choice.
Objecting to Meta specifically here is a response to VR suggestions. The other two companies are irrelevant in this conversation because neither has a VR headset available for use (that I know of). It doesn't help that the Oculus Quest is the cheapest VR option out there, so it gets suggested every time the topic comes up, so those of us who prefer to avoid the three companies you mentioned tend to have a quick response ready.
It's a different type of platform and regardless, the second half of your comment ruled out the value of the first.
Yes or no: can a standalone headset play games like a PC-connected headset can? If yes, it is not a poor substitute. If no, then it is a poor substitute. This is the dichotomy I established with my comment.