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Comment by fixprix | Hacker News Reader

Looks like Apple might be prioritizing gaming for the next gen Vision devices? Hopefully, as I know many, myself included that passed on the Vision because the gaming support wasn't there. Price was never an issue.

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This to me smells of desperation - not so much as "prioritising gaming" and more "prioritising anyone making any kind of content at all please please please someone make something for our device".

It no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.

It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.

I think there is "playing the long game" and there is "flogging a dead horse".

I still can't believe that both apple and meta bet the farm on VR and screwed up so spectacularly. It was fairly clear that VR was never going to be mainstream for the same reasons that 3D movies and TVs vanished after all that fanfare and marketing a few years ago: people don't want to wear the glasses, and they don't want to pay extra either. We've been there and tried this - people are happy with 2D screens and don't see any real benefits of 3D glasses/headsets worth paying for (...apart from the nerdfactor).

Sure there might be some sort of market for "smart glasses" and people are continually releasing various iterations of those (and I'd be up for a pair too FWIW), but if the vision pro is any indication of what the tech is capable of today, we're a very very long way away from normal-glasses-style form factor units (i.e. size, weight, battery life, discreetness, price, nausea etc).

Tl;Dr - nice try doing something new, but if I were an apple investor I'd prefer they went back to what they knew and not waste further billions upon billions "playing the long game" on a dead-end because they can't accept they made a mistake.

> flogging a dead horse

It's the first version of their XR device.

I still own the first iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch and remember people saying that each one would be failures.

500$ is a toy most upper middle class families can afford. That's the Meta Quest 3.

3500$ will even have someone making 200k plus pause to think if they really need it.

Not to mention the Vision Pro looks much more fragile. Looks like it'll slip off my face and shatter.

I'm cool with wasting $500, but I could do a lot of things of $3,500.That's a round trip flight to Thailand and a nice hotel room, you might be able to fit in a trip to Paris too.

I think we’ve forgotten over the years just how expensive tech can be. The original iMac was 1299 at launch, inflation adjusted that’s $2500 today, for what even at the time was considered a cut down machine. The iBook would launch the next year for $1599, or about $3k today. Is the AVP at least as interesting of a product to buyers as the original iMac or iBook was in 1998? Bear in mind 1998 Apple was just barely holding on after years of mismanagement, still was running Mac OS 8 and neither the iPod juggernaut nor OSX were anywhere on the horizon for people to suspect that Apple would even still be in business or supporting their proprietary computers in a few years.

Perhaps more apt, the original Macintosh released at $2495, or a whopping $7,500 inflation adjusted. Now I’m not thinking that the AVP is necessarily going to change the computing world the way the Macintosh did, but surely its novelty and potential fits somewhere between an iMac and an original Macintosh right?

It's the Vision Pro: for professionals not middle class families.

Apple has every intention of releasing a lower cost version for people like you.

So instead of building for a platform that has a low barrier of entry and millions upon millions of users, developers should spend time in Apple’s expense plantation.

All in the hopes of sharecropping on the Vision Store.

Honestly I want an open source headset I can run my own code on , that’s what I’m waiting for

You can run your own code on the VisionOS.

And it's weird to call it sharecropping when developers are simply trying to get paid for their hard work.

The only way to officially distribute apps for iOS devices is via the App Store, giving 30% off top to Apple. If that's not sharecropping I don't know what is

Does anyone in the industry care about VR gaming right now?

I don't see people buying headsets, I don't see VR features in new major games, it's just not a thing outside of a probably shrinking niche.

You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest.

What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.

Lookup GorillaTag a surprise smash hit that made half $1 billion(!) revenue on the Meta quest!

That is a good example of a good and successful VR game, but it's also three years old.

  https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-02-07%202025-03-07&q=VRChat,HomePod

It would be strange if they went about it this way, as it gives the godot community some unprecedented control over apple's release schedule

My fear is that they won't treat godot first class and release updates for unity first. That kind of first class support would be required for me to switch from unity.

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