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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I had one and I sold it. I'd be more interested to know how many are in active use and how many have been resold.

Bought a Quest 2 in 2022, I got a lot of use out of it initially (mostly played Pavlov Shack, SUPERHOT VR, and community-made ports of classic FPS games), then fell off using it after ~8 months. When I built my new PC I had a blast with it again, I blitzed through Half-Life Alyx and was hopping on a community VRChat meetup every weekend... Then I fell off again.

Messing about in VR and shooting has to be the most fun I've had with vidya since I was a kid, but it's the dedication required which kills it for me. I have to be in the right mood to go into my cupboard, take it out the box, connect it to my PC, and play about for a few hours – when I come home from work if I want to shoot some baddies it's way easier to sit down at my desk to do it. And I don't end up drenched in sweat at my PC.

The last time I picked it up was back in November for a VRChat meetup. It's a shame really because playing VR games is such a joy, but it's marred with each little roadbump to get there.

The struggles you people have seem unfortunate. It takes me the same amount of time or less to jump into my Q3 and start playing as it does anything else. For a start I don’t keep things I want to use in a closet which I suppose helps.

I one the other hand bought one before Christmas and love it. I got a Valve Index when it first released and while a fun gimmick, I don't think I've used it more than 20 hours. I have yet to play Half Life Alyx.

The Quest 3 on the other hand is so plug and play I put it on pretty much every evening after work, especially because I have grown to dislike sitting on my desk to play video games.

This generation of Quest might be the first device to reach critical mass I reckon. A lot of naysayers are a bit like those that believed videogames to be a fad in the 1980s. Yeah, it's nascent technology, but it is improving at breakneck pace. Even Apple is in the space now.

Every kid loved videogames. I see no such enthusiasm for VR. My experience mirrors that of many others here, and of those I handed the 3 VR headsets I bought over the years: interesting, but just interesting. One off experience.

I was just house sitting for some friends who went out of town and my partner and I watched over their 3 boys. Good kids, but addicted to screens. None of them cared anything about VR. The youngest just watched the equivalent of tiktok on TV for hours on end, until we could pry him away to go for a bike ride outside with us. The two older ones just played games on their computers. I found this quite interesting cause the family has the money to pay for stuff like this, the kids just don't care about it.

For me, the only game I really enjoyed was beatsaber and I got to the point where I wasn't going to get any better and stopped. That's when I realized this thing isn't for me and sold it before it ended up collecting dust.

You can’t let any kid under 12 play VR yet, so we have to keep telling our son this. He can’t play BeatSaber until he is 12, it’s almost like a law.

Two of the boys were over 15 and one under, but none seemed to have an interest in it at all.

Oh interesting, I didn't know that. Looking it up [0], it is actually 13+, so you're safe for another year. =)

[0] https://www.meta.com/quest/safety-center/ - Meta accounts are available for ages 10+ on Meta Quest 2 and 3 (may vary depending on country); all other Meta Quest headsets are for ages 13+.

I think they are being overly conservative but here we are. My kid is 7 so it’s a long time before he is old enough. But there is enough popularity about BeatSaber here that he wants to just play that.

I'm pretty well convinced that unless you start beatsaber at a super young age, you'll never get the skill to hit the advanced levels. I got fairly high up and just realized that I physically just can't move that fast, but I'm old now... so it is what it is.

You don't have to play expert+ to get enjoyment from the game.

I am competitive with myself and got bored.

If you DGAF about the small niches where VR makes a huge improvement, like flight sims, driving sims, basically any sim where you just sit in one place, and also shooting games are pretty good, then VR provides no improvement to video gaming. The vast majority of games are NOT improved by vague "it increases immersion" claims. Nobody would play FIFA if you had to put down the controller and run around and buy $200 worth of trackers for your feet so you could kick an imaginary ball with no feedback.

Nevermind the fact that some portion of humans will never be able to do basically anything with a screen attached to their face because they are too sensitive to motion sickness.

There are some similarly small entertainment niches outside of gaming, too. For example, high-res (think 8K+) fractal videos in VR are amazing to watch, and I use it for that regularly.

It's just not clear that all this stuff in aggregate adds up to enough users to sustain a business model that would allow for VR as affordable as Quest 3.

I read 6 million MAU which if reasonably accurate answers part of your question.

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