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Comment by tonmoy | Hacker News Reader

I feel Quest is so well priced because Meta is probably losing money trying get consumers to buy them

That's what all console makers did to gain market share though. Sell cheap HW on the loss, then make it back on games sales. And VR tech is still expensive and not commoditized yet like consoles which are now just PCs.

Not true. Nintendo historically made profit on every game system that came out, which explains their use of older, cheaper technology. I don’t know if this is true for the Switch though.

Nintendo also makes notoriously bad consoles (by spec, not uniqueness). Their IP is more of the reason they succeed than is the case for most consoles. Their hardware is always years behind the specs for competitors.

We have long since reached the point where top tier specs don’t matter that much. Gameplay isn’t being held back by the hardware anymore.

Old and cheap technology like Nintendo uses doesn't work to sell VR. You gotta be at leaser somewhat cutting edge.

Plus Nintendo has several failures, the Virtualboy, the Gamecube, WiiU.

Definitely true of the Switch. I’m not sure if it’s true of their older hardware, though - the FC, SFC, N64 and GC were all fairly advanced for their times and still modestly priced at launch. The N64 in particular was a pile of high-end custom silicon - if they weren’t selling at a loss, they were getting one hell of a sweetheart deal from SGI and Rambus.

My understanding is that the “old technology” approach guided their portable lineup more than anything, and only started to be adopted by their mainline consoles as they started to struggle there and felt they needed a different approach from Sony/MS to compete.

It didn't take Microsoft and Sony a decade to make a dent in video games. With games, it's not about the hardware anyway. If it were we'd all be rushing to buy the Dreamcast V.

You're compering apples to carrots. In the case of VR, it definetly is about the hardware. To give users a good VR experience you need to be able to drive high resolution displays at high refresh rates, otherwise you'll get a nausea inducing ugly screen-door image that nobody will appreciate no matter how good your games are.

That to me sounds like VR is selling a home theater system when 95% of the market is happy with what's coming out of their TV+soundbar.

Again, apples to carrots.

You can play a game at 40hz on a TV but in VR that would instantly give you motion sickness.

Different limitations and challenges.

What I'm saying is that VR can improve leaps and bounds, like home theaters have. It doesn't mean the market for it will grow the same way. It's still a niche interest for most. Sony doesn't invest much in PS VR, and you'd think they would if they thought it'd sell to their customers.

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