Maybe, Maybe Not, but the Rift will not be mainstream (Gaming)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, January 07, 2016, 05:55 (3243 days ago) @ uberfoop
edited by narcogen, Thursday, January 07, 2016, 06:04

VR will now officially never take off in the near future.

I couldn't make it past this sentence. Just try to parse that. You cannot and remain sane.

It's parsable, just a little ambiguous. It could mean that it won't take off in the near future (with the "never" being intersected with the finite time bounds of "near future"), but it could also mean that there will never be a time for which VR will take off in the near future, which is to say that VR will never take off.

You can't bound an absolute like that. Never means never, not ever.

What you are saying he actually meant would be the same as saying "VR will NOT take off in the near future."

That, of course, is not nearly enough hyperbole for Cody, which is why he didn't say it that way. He wants all the impact of "never" without any of the commitment, so he added "in the near future" as a hedge against him being wrong if or when VR does improve, get cheaper, and become more popular, which it could conceivably do, with or without the arbitrary constraints of what Cody might vaguely mean by "in the near future".

For me, I have to say I never had much interest in the Oculus Rift, at least not in current form, and at $600 plus PC, Windows and 970 graphics card, I have even less. I'd suppose the best way to popularize this would be to bundle it with a console and subsidize it. Whether the failure of Kinect and Move mean it is not possible to do this, or that motion controls were just the wrong choice of a new peripheral to push, I don't know. There is something to the position that consoles work as a cheap and popular vector for gaming because it comes with everything you need except a TV, which is something everyone in the target market has.

The extent to which console makers could push it as a new display option really depends on how much more work it takes to develop games that really utilize it, and how easy it is to make games developed for it work on ordinary displays-- which is basically the same question Kinect and Move faced-- how do they use the peripheral as a core component and not just a gimmick, while making sure those development costs aren't lost if the use of the peripheral doesn't stick (or if the console maker stops bundling it).

This pricing just means that this edition of the Rift is not going to be mainstream. Whether or not Oculus ever thought it could be is debatable. Whether AAA PC gaming even is at this point is truly mainstream is debatable, and VR exists on the fringe of that and probably will for the foreseeable future. One estimate I've seen suggests that in 2015 something fewer than 35 million GPU cards were sold, of which about 5-10% of are "high end", which includes cards less capable than the 970, which was only introduced in late 2014, and its AMD equivalent, the 290, a bit later.

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2016/01/vr-sales-data-we-can-count-on/

The author concludes that the installed base of VR-capable cards next year starts at 3 million. An attach rate of 10% for VR displays against that would mean 300K is the size of your addressable audience for VR games, but split among different vendors-- not all Oculus.

In fact, it may simply be that $600 is too cheap, that they would not sell significantly fewer of these at a higher price point, and they are starving themselves of cash flow. If they plan on using Facebook's resources to subsidize the hardware, then $600 is too high to popularize the unit.

I get sort of a kick out of the perception that the PC gaming space, right now in terms of size and importance, has the same sort of relationship with console gaming that Mac gaming (to the extent such a thing even exists) has typically had with PC gaming. The difference, of course, is that PCs for the express purpose of gaming still exist and will continue to do so, whereas arguably that never existed under any stripe of Mac OS. In terms of how high a priority it is as a development target for many big developers, though... there's something similar there when you see high profile games coming out late and in bad shape, or in many cases, not ever. It's interesting-- and VR is the bleeding edge of that.

Best take I've seen so far on the Rift pricing came from Total Biscuit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAwXhbYM-UE