Valve's Gabe Newell Says Only 30 SteamVR Apps Have Made $250,000+ (roadtovr.com) 151
New submitter rentarno writes: According to Valve President, Gabe Newell, only 30 virtual-reality apps on Steam (of some 1,000) have made more than $250,000. But that isn't stopping the company from throwing the bulk of their weight behind virtual reality; Valve recently confirmed that it's working on 3 full VR games. Valve still believes in a huge future for VR, even while things are slow to start. It'll take work to find and make the content that's great for VR, Newell says. "We got Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress running in VR. It was kind of a novelty, purely a development milestone. There was absolutely nothing compelling about them. Nobody's going to buy a VR system so they can watch movies. You have to aspire and be optimistic that the unique characteristics of VR will cause you to discover a bunch of stuff that isn't possible on any of the existing platforms." How do you view the VR industry in early 2017? Do you think it shows promise or will eventually fail like 3D TV?
confirmed (Score:3, Funny)
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Half-Life 3, Portal 3, Left 4 Dead 3, and Team Fortress 3 will all be released as a time exclusive for SteamOS and the HTC Vive.
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Team Fortress 3 has been released. It is called Overwatch.
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Oh how quickly the youth forget that Team Fortress 1 / MegaTF was simply a mod for Quake
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And Quake was simply the 3D version of Doom.
Candy Crush Spotify Tinder Clash Clans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Candy Crush Spotify Tinder Clash Clans (Score:5, Insightful)
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You missed a bunch.
Basically check out any app that's advertised on prime time. A prime-time TV 30-second ad slot costs around half of the quarter million (on average - TV prime time slots are usually around $100-150k).
Hell, weren't there a few that advertised during the superbowl ($5M/slot)?
It's just too expensive for the hardware (Score:1)
It's pretty simple really: When the systems themselves reach a certain affordability threshold, sales of the games will increase dramatically. I don't know what that price threshold is, but I imagine it's much much lower than the Vive's current price.
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Is it though?
3D TV for a while reached the point where people were buying them without even trying ... the model with 3D was cheaper than the model without due to a sale, or everything that had desirable feature X also had 3D, or the store only had the 3DTVs in stock if you wanted a Sharp... or Sony or whatever.
Not even being basically 'free' was enough to get 3DTV to really take off.
I'm not sure VR is going to fare better... maybe they could give headsets away free with happy meals and maybe most p
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It's not so clear with 3D. It's something of a misnomer to call current displays 2D and this kind of VR interface 3D. Both provide a subset of the dozen or so cues that the human brain uses to turn inputs into a 3D mental model. They both, for example, manage occlusion and distance blurring, but neither manages (yet) to correctly adjust the focal depth of parts of the image that are further away. Motion sickness is caused by disagreements between some of these cues and between the other cues that you us
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It's pretty simple really: When the systems themselves reach a certain affordability threshold, sales of the games will increase dramatically. I don't know what that price threshold is, but I imagine it's much much lower than the Vive's current price.
Agreed, price is a major factor in adoption. However, there is evidence that VR prices could come down to much more affordable levels for people in the near future (maybe within 3-10 years?). For example, currently Google Cardboard VR is really cheap (assuming one already owns a compatible smartphone), but it's low-quality makes it little more than a novelty right now. However, it's a really cheap starting point and technology steadily improves over time. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe tech adva
Re: It's just too expensive for the hardware (Score:1)
Things have changed however. Valve has done a great service to vr by adding roomscale gaming plus tracked controllers from the get go and this is what makes the technology better than just a glorified 3D viewer.
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will probably take off with next gen hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
The current generation of VR headsets is bulky, the resolution is mediocre, the cables are annoying, and the profusion of platforms and controllers makes it painful to set up and use.
The next gen is going to be higher resolution and wireless, and Microsoft is going to have standard APIs for them. I expect that's when they'll go mainstream.
WebVR also isn't ready for prime time yet, but once it is, you'll probably see a lot more VR porn sites popping up, which should also help adoption.
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I basically agree - VR as it currently stands is not going to take off. The current experience is nifty but it quickly becomes annoying. The cables get in the way. The controllers work but you're still holding on to little plastic bits.
The next gen is going to be higher resolution and wireless, and Microsoft is going to have standard APIs for them. I expect that's when they'll go mainstream.
Here's where I'm not sure I agree - I think what's going to go mainstream first is smartphone VR, for one simple reason: just about everyone owns a smartphone. It's inherently wireless. Assuming you stick to Android devices (as Apple isn't doing anything with VR and seems to
Re:will probably take off with next gen hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
The best smartphone based VR experiences at best result in result in a "neat..." response while PC based room scale + motion controls makes it possible to truly trick your brain into feeling like your in a completely different world.
Smartphone VR is the 3D TV of VR. It simply doesn't offer a significantly better experience than it's 2D counter part. I don't see this changing until we get massively more powerful smartphones and full positional tracking.
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That's a problem with the phone-based VR displays, but generally not with the Rift or Vive. If you haven't tried the latter, you really haven't experienced VR.
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Yes, you can, even using brute force methods. There really is little reason why not: HDMI involves as much processing for transmission as wireless.
Of course, if you put graphics processing and sensors into the headset, wireless headsets could actually do better than wired ones even with slower connections.
Hololens CAN be VR (Score:2)
What has Microsoft done with VR? Hololens is not VR.
The beauty of any AR systems is that they can also be VR, they simply block out the entirety of the outside world, or otherwise re-skin it (a better approach so you don't bump into real objects).
Now it's true that the Hololens cannot block out your whole FOV presently, but that's why they have extended out the timeline for delivering a consumer product. As it is the 360 videos they offer still work pretty well, even in the smallish field of view they cove
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Just used one the other night. It's incredible, well and truly incredible.
Personally, I'd get one of those before I get VR. The real-world applications are far wider than VR.
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Hololens is not VR
Indeed. AR doesn't seem to trigger the same motion sickness responses as VR, because you retain all of the visual cues from the real world.
Microsoft is once again creating a product that nobody will use.
Microsoft has created a technology that anyone can use without feeling motion sick, but you think that it will lose in the marketplace to one that about 80% of people can use without feeling motion sick? That's an interesting perspective.
Massively Multiple Player VR Sex (Score:2)
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I think VR sex is the only thing that will save VR from the dustbin. Maybe VR porn could pull enough money in to keep development going....VR sex chat bots....
Until a decent fufme shows up cheaply, VR sex is just VR porn.
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I for one welcome our new VR girlfriends.
Not obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a few games that are *awesome* in VR. The obvious ones are cockpit games - flight sims and the like. The others are less obvious.
I love space pirate trainer. It has to have been pretty easy to make. In 2d it'd suck.
I just hope that there are enough users to support the effort needed.
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It's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. I have a PSVR and aside from RE7 and Sony's own VR Playroom there's absolutely nothing worth playing.
There's a long list of PSVR titles on Wikipedia but the vast, vast majority are either quick tech demos that aren't really games, or complete shit. Some of them look pretty (eg EVE Valkyrie) but play like shit (eg EVE Valkyrie).
Until there are more solid game titles there's little point buying a VR headset. And until there are more VR headsets there's little point spend
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While you're not wrong, it's hardly unexpected that such an expensive, small-userbase piece of hardware hasn't brought in megabux for developers yet, and AAA publishers will likely keep waiting.
However, I think the more important gaben quote is this:
“Developers are super excited. There’s nobody who works in VR saying, ‘oh I’m bored with this.’ Everybody comes back. For every idea they had in their first generation product, they have ten ideas now.”
So it's clear that developers at least are still absolutely willing to experiment, and we can expect numerous interesting and innovative VR indie games to keep people interested while hardware gets better and cheaper. So long as developers remain keen, hardware
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Space Pirate Trainer and Audio Shield, I think stand out in my mind as examples of how it should be done. I have played both for hours on end.
But Valve does get it, two of the best mini games are in their free package "The Lab": Slingshot and Longbow. Slingshot is just hilarious, although not a great example of how to use VR. Longbow however is an absolutely excellent VR game that utilizes both the capabilities of the headset as well as an inspired use of the controllers to feel as natural to archery as yo
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Try to step on the spot when walking with joysticks. I had massive problems with Doom 3 VR and serious sam making me sick. But eating a ginger drop and walking on the spot completely eradicated motion sickness for me
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You can move around a small room just fine, it works exactly as advertised and couldn't be more natural (assuming you are used to walking)
Sure, if you have enough room to set up a Vive. Nobody I know in the UK has that much space without seriously rearranging their house.
It's a broken concept and modern houses keep getting smaller so I don't see a future for room scale VR in the UK. That's likely to apply to most of Europe and a non-trivial proportion of the US too - e.g. everybody living in cheap apartments.
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I think it's this idea that people want to move about the room that has held VR back as manufacturers get overly fixated on room-level stuff. All I want from VR is a super-immersive 3D monitor where I can turn my head and look around me. I don't need to get up and run around the room and frankly, I don't want to do that. My chair is quite comfortable for gaming.
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Nobody I know in the UK has that much space without seriously rearranging their house.
It's not much better in Texas to be honest. I do have the room if I want to make it in one room of my house, but strong risk of falling down stairs. Then consider the improbability of moving with children and a dog around while being essentially blind, it's not a good feeling. The technology does work though.
I'm not really sold that small scale movement is useful. I think standing in place or approximately in place works
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All the of the VR games so far have been small demo-like mobile-game level crap. Where's the big games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, or Skyrim? VR won't take off for anyone but the early-adopters if they refuse to make big mainstream games for it.
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There are a few games that are *awesome* in VR. The obvious ones are cockpit games - flight sims and the like.
I'd agree that cockpit games do exceptionally well in VR. Likely in no small part because your "real position in the real world" most closely matches your position in the virtual world. I.e. Sitting in a chair with your hands on a joystick/throttle. Also, once you get used to the advantages realistic of head tracking in such games, you'll actually find it difficult to go back to non-VR for such games.
However, until VR resolution (and close focus ability) dramatically improves, there will be an enormous bia
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Fair enough - but that seems like a hardware problem. I expect the resolution to get better over time - as it always has.
Re:Not obvious (Score:4)
My first taste of "proper" VR was on a mate's Rift DK1. I think that was great because it was the novelty. What I took away from that was the genuine fear of falling off of high things, which I don't get gaming normally. The 2D screen is a safe level of isolation from the world of the game.
Nowadays, I'm playing VR on a budget - an old business i5 machine with a second hand GTX 970 and PSU slapped into it, plus an eBay Rift DK2 which didn't cost a lot. The DK2 has worked with everything I've tried on Steam VR, to give me a feel as to whether to fork out for a "proper" expensive headset.
The thrill of "being in" a game world doesn't wear off. Subnautica and Obduction are such examples. In Obduction there are paths to walk along alongside a mountain with a huge drop to one side. It looks pretty on a monitor, but it's awe-inspiring in VR. The same with standing and looking up at structures that tower above you - much more immersive in VR. Subnautica is just beautiful to swim around.
But, it is a bit tiring on the eyes. The screen door effect is completely annoying - sometimes I can get submerged in the game enough to ignore it but not for long because it's right there in my face. I understand the CV1 and Vive are better in that regard than the DK2, but it's still there to an extent. The technology needs to move on at least another generation to really make it properly viable in my opinion (caveat - I've not tried the CV1 or Vive yet - but I read reviews that grumble to an extent about the screen door effect).
So I play both 2D and VR - the former usually if I am sitting with someone and want to talk and share the experience. VR when I want to feel what the world is like around me.
When I'm playing 2D, I feel like I'm missing out on the immersion.
When I'm playing in VR, I feel like I'm missing out on a nice detailed screen without obvious pixels and that annoying screen door effect.
VR is where gaming will end up, I don't doubt it. I really want it to be good enough to use all the time. For me the DK2 isn't quite up to it, but I still can't resist strapping it on for a couple of hours to get the feel of a place that can't be captured in 2D.
And there is still the huge entertainment factor of having guests over and watching them try to stand up while on a VR rollercoaster. It was worth the expense just for those laughs.
3DTV I don't care for at all. Tried it, it was OK. But VR is something else.
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Why are multiple monitors better than a VR headset?
You can use proper flight sticks/yokes/wheels with either setup.
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You put your hands on the controls when you start. Duh. Do you look at your car's steering wheel to find it?
Solid controls make VR less pukey.
It's different (Score:4, Interesting)
Sick of hearing about the "3D TV Fail" (Score:2, Interesting)
This post ends with the comment-bait line "How do you view the VR industry in early 2017? Do you think it shows promise or will eventually fail like 3D TV?" My 3D TV works fine. My wife and I watched X-Men Apocalypse on it just last weekend. No problems. Am I supposed to think it's a failure because it didn't become ubiquitous? Or is it a failure because the TV manufacturers couldn't keep pitching it as the get-in-now-or-get-left-behind future to drive a sale? That's not what technicians call failure. T
Re:Sick of hearing about the "3D TV Fail" (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's reasonable to consider a technology as "failed" if everybody building it gets out of that market due to lack of consumer interest. Like you, I have a 3DTV and do occasionally use that feature. But if all of the TV manufacturers have decided that it costs them more to include that small amount of extra hardware than they make back from consumers such as us, then I'll agree that it's a failed idea.
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Okay, I'll bite. Let me know when you really actually totally for reals can't buy a TV with 3D, and I'll agree that the "idea" has failed. When do you think you'll be getting back to me on this?
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Oh mighty prophet coward, why not post as self so I can check back with you on 2/23/2020 and see how hard it is to find a TV that can display 3D with syncronized glasses? High-end...that's funny. The thing I don't get is why so many people are invested in this concept of calling a perfectly-working feature "dead". I don't get what you think success looks like.
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Not long now.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/29/3d-television-set-dead-major-manufacturers-stop-making/
No-one is making 3D TVs beyond 2018.
You are posting as coward because you're afraid of looking like a fool come 2019.
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My parents got a 3D tv a few years ago, used it to watch Avatar a couple times but haven't touched the glasses since then. It's still a nice tv, they just do not use that functionality at all and have not bought any 3D movies.
Similarly, I have a projector I recently purchased to hang up in my basement when I complete it. No intention of ever using the 3D functionality.
VR could conceivably fall into
Only 30? (Score:4, Funny)
How do they compare? (Score:3, Insightful)
How can anyone compare VR with the failure of 3D TV? 3D TV failed because who wants to wear cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others? 3D TV is expensive, and causes headaches and eye-strain for some people. There wasn't any killer content to push people to 3D TV that was overwhelmingly good enough to overcome the disadvantages; a lot of 3D content was perfectly watchable in 2D. 3D TV was just an expensive novelty.
But with VR... well admittedly it has the cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others, and is expensive, and causes eye-strain and nausea, and has no killer app. But can you say that it's just a novelty? .... Hmmm. OK, maybe they are the same after all.
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So much fail in your post...
I've done VFX work on truly shot with two physical cameras stereo and the post conversion shitty stuff stereo. The immersiveness of 3D tv/film shitty at best.
VR on the other hand is like the matrix from the moment you put that visor over your eyes.
If you aren't wow'd by it then your lack of imagination/wonder is what I'd consider def not normal.
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If you aren't wow'd by it then your lack of imagination/wonder is what I'd consider def not normal.
Considering the low sales of VR games that is being reported here, it seems my "lack of imagination" is actually quite normal. It really doesn't matter how impressive the experience is if it makes you feel nauseous playing it for too long. It doesn't matter how impressive it is if it is priced so absurdly high that it is beyond the reach of most people.
And it doesn't matter how impressive it is if the games are actually fairly casual, bland experiences. Developers are finding that VR seems to work best when
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Blah-blah. Around 10 people age 30 to 65 played with my Vive. Nobody felt nauseous.
Ah yes, the old "none of my small group of friends has this problem therefore it doesn't exist". By the same logic, I've never met your group of friends, therefore they don't exist. That would explain why none of them have ever suffered nausea.
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How can anyone compare VR with the failure of 3D TV? 3D TV failed because who wants to wear cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others? 3D TV is expensive, and causes headaches and eye-strain for some people. There wasn't any killer content to push people to 3D TV that was overwhelmingly good enough to overcome the disadvantages; a lot of 3D content was perfectly watchable in 2D. 3D TV was just an expensive novelty.
But with VR... well admittedly it has the cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others, and is expensive, and causes eye-strain and nausea, and has no killer app. But can you say that it's just a novelty? .... Hmmm. OK, maybe they are the same after all.
The problem with 3DTV is 3D no matter how well implemented just isn't that big a deal. Stereo perception is such a small piece of overall way people perceive scale and depth even if you turned the effect completely off in VR it would hardly be missed.
The difference with VR is as quality approaches holodeck, matrix or Tomorrowland advertisement ring the value proposition grows to become essentially unbounded where 3DTV even when implemented perfectly to it's full potential (e.g. perfect multi-user glasses
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There's more to VR though (doesn't mean it will work out, but it may).
3D TV was offering nothing but depth perception, it showed the exact same thing as 2d TV.
With VR there's a new way to interact.
I'm not saying it will take off, I haven't even used it, but I do think there's a chance. With the TV no killer app could even be made, with VR, there's at least potential that someone developes a killer app.
Real 3D vs Fake 3D (Score:2)
How can anyone compare VR with the failure of 3D TV?
3D TV "failed" (though I see there are still 3D showings of any big movie to this day) because it's not really 3D at all. Just because you can tell some things are closer is nothing like 3D. It's maybe 2.5D at best - you can't lean over to look at something behind something in front, for example...
The reason why VR (really the AR/VR spectrum) will succeed is that it's fully 3D. You can look around something You can look under something. You can move a
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The social dynamics for each are very different. PC gamers typically play either alone in the room they're in and/or wearing a headset that already socially isolates them.
Adding visual isolation wont make a drastic difference for much usage, and may increase the in-game social dynamics to compensate.
The issues with headaches, eye-strain and nausea remain barriers, but for some game genres (driving/flying type games) it's already far from a novelty.
Just like the steam machines... (Score:1)
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Valve isn't a game dev anymore. It's just a marketplace.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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AR may be the culmination - so long as it's also capable of replacing all your reality, instead of only some of it. While AR is a much broader category, and useful in a vast variety of fields, there's still some very large niches for completely virtual reality, such as games, education, tourism, semi-interactive entertainment, many categories of desk work; nearly anything that benefits from a focus on information, rather than nearby people or surroundings. And there's a lot of jobs, hobbies, and entertainme
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I'd say VR will be niche UNTIL we achieve a highly sophisticated brain-machine interface, and I'm talking about to the point where volunteer-motor functions are interrupted and redirected.
Of course, at that point there will be bigger concerns..."what is reality" starts becoming one of them.
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A sufficiently good AR system could overlay an alien world over your real environment. That means you're not limited to fake-walking in a room, or limited to a small alien world the size of your room.
Year One Was Good (Score:3)
Considering how brief and low-budget many of these apps are, it's not too surprising that only ~3% have made more than a quarter-million bucks. Many of the apps aren't even games, but 'experiences' that are either non-interactive, or are sandboxes with no rules/win condition. A VR game that lasts 5 hours is considered 'long' still, with ports of 2d games being nearly the only ones that are significantly longer. Recall that many early 2d games on the Atari or NES would only last an hour or so for a playthrough, if not for their difficulty.
AAA video games have been stuck in a rut for the past 12 or so years, I think due to the standardization of controllers. New controller features/more buttons drove much of the development of more sophisticated games. I recall first seeing a PSX controller and thinking "that's too many buttons! two on each shoulder?!" but now suspect that a few more might give the industry a shot in the arm; look at how overloaded the buttons are in e.g. the Dark Souls games, and how often a context-sensitive button gets the context wrong. The PS2 added analog face buttons but they were then removed a generation or two later since no games figured out how to use them in a compelling fashion, although the analog triggers remained (thanks, Dreamcast!). Recall what new ideas came out of early mobile games from touchscreen/gyroscope controls, e.g. Angry Birds and Zenbound.
VR makes gameplay that depends on depth perception a possibility; the 3ds was supposed to do this but it was too unstable (at first) and low-resolution to give accurate depth cues. Interacting with depth is made easier with the new generation of motion controllers, that are finally accurate enough to make it feel like your hands are in the game.
Most critics cite the high price of VR but it's been gradually coming down. You can get a Google Cardboard viewer for nearly free from multiple sources, and if you don't have a smartphone you can get a used old-model Galaxy S from ebay cheap, and combine it with a Gear VR. If you have a ps4 there's the $500 (all included) PS VR. Even the high-end PC-connected VR is getting cheaper; a year ago you'd need a ~$320 Geforce 970 graphics card plus a $600 Oculus Rift (assuming your PC is somewhat recent), but now a $170 Radeon RX 470 will suffice, and the Rift and Vive were $100 off (more or less) around Christmas. Rumor is the Vive's price will drop $100 or so later this year due to cheaper base stations/tracking chips. Windows Holographic headsets are coming out this year for $300, which connect to Windows PCs of course. In addition, multiple companies are working on all-in-one solutions, some of which will likely hit market this year, expected to be around $500.
Disclaimer: I've never actually tried VR, but am excited about it and follow the scene closely.
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I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but I couldn't post everything at once (lame filter). So here's the rest:
Motion controllers also allow for more immersive/intuitive controls, e.g. reloading a gun, throwing a grenade, or aiming a bow. Aiming a gun can be made close enough to real gun aiming that real-world skill enters the picture; most VR games with shooting have some degree of autoaim because most gamers are poor shots IRL.
VR hardware is improving in every way, as well. Third-party accessories
I was skeptical about VR (Score:5, Insightful)
...until I tried it.
I have no idea when exactly VR is going to happen--obviously, a >$500 PC + an 800 headset is too big a price point to see mass adoption--but I have no doubt it is going to happen. There's really never been anything like it. I got a Vive some months ago and every person I've shown it to has come out of it looking like they're coming down from a mushroom trip.
However, the challenges to making the experience as compelling as we naturally feel it should be are numerous. Not only does a developer need engineers and art and immersive sound etc., like any interactive medium, but designing for total experience is just something there isn't even a vocabulary for yet. A film director has total control over the frame; a screen-game designer still has quite a bit. Not so in VR; people look wherever they want to. And then how to design for people of all sorts of different physiologies, heights, abilities, etc. etc. and make the experience compelling for each of them? It's a monumental task, and anyone saying otherwise just really hasn't thought about it.
It's my feeling that all this talk about VR "making it" or not is really just a news cycle digesting itself. Last year some people figured out they could make headlines if they talked out of their asses about billions-of-billions-of-dollars in instant revenue. A lot of people outside the industry thought this was pretty exciting. Then it didn't happen. Now the adults (Newell, as well as HTC's CEO Chou, Zuckerberg, etc.) are stepping in and saying, "uhh, we don't know why you were listening to those guys in the first place."
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Unfortunately, the vast majority of people's first interaction with "VR" is through Google Cardboard, Gear VR, and other Viewmaster methods of holding your cellphone up to your face. That's about as from from actual, immersive 3D VR as you can get. But it's enough to make people go "Hey, this is kind of interesting but why should I pony up $700 for a Vive? This isn't worth $700." and onto the pile of failed tech it goes.
I truly believe that the future of real VR is bright. The potential is limitless. But w
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A film director has total control over the frame; a screen-game designer still has quite a bit. Not so in VR; people look wherever they want to.
A game designer - screen or otherwise - has complete and total control over what appears to the player. Far more control than a film director, and the choice to give an illusion of that control to the player (with FOV changes as well as just looking around) without losing any of it.
Shit, players looking wherever they want was a solved problem in 1984: Elite required you to move your whole ship but didn't constrain where you pointed it at all.
And then how to design for people of all sorts of different physiologies, heights, abilities, etc. etc. and make the experience compelling for each of them?
Possibly the very exactly same fucking way that game designers hav
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Possibly the very exactly same fucking way that game designers have been successfully handling this challenge in games over the past few decades.
Okay, so you're doing level design, say for a shooter. Gears of War. You've got to take cover behind stuff so as not to get annihilated. How do you design that stuff? If you make it too tall you've got some portion of the population that can't see over it, make it too short and you've got people bending at the waist to duck. Make it too thin and you've got someone sticking their arm through it to shoot. Make it too fat and they can just camp out inside it, shielded by the box collider around it.
I get it th
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Okay, so you're doing level design, say for a shooter. Gears of War. You've got to take cover behind stuff so as not to get annihilated. How do you design that stuff? If you make it too tall you've got some portion of the population that can't see over it, make it too short and you've got people bending at the waist to duck.
Exactly the same fucking way that you design it now.
You think a VR headset knows how tall you are? No. Your in-game avatar and your real height are entirely completely totally and intentionally utterly fucking disconnected.
I can enter a VR game as a 2 year old girl in nappies or as a 20 metre tall dinosaur. I don't have to actually shit myself or eat tall trees in real life to do this.
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Um. You have never used a Vive, have you.
Pro-tip: saying "fucking" a lot doesn't make up for a total lack of experience in what you're talking about.
Only? (Score:2)
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These days, thatbarely keeps the lights on at a small company.
The average price for a VR game on Steam is around $25, so these games are selling less than 10k units. So the top 30 games have sold maybe 400-500k units total.
Considering well under half-million headsets have have been sold (was 150k back in September, just after supply issues had been resolved) [wareable.com] Let's say during the holiday rush they doubled that to 300k Vive units shipped.
That's a pretty pathetic attach rate, which means either (1) the gam
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They must be doing something wrong then because Resident Evil VII has over 250,000 registered players. Registration is optional so who knows what the actual numbers are ? That is for PSVR alone, maybe not supporting the PSVR is what they are doing wrong.
http://www.roadtovr.com/latest... [roadtovr.com]
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Darn it, having to reply to myself.
Actually 280,000 is an estimate, the actually registered number of VR users is currently 142,185.
The 280,000 figure is based on the 9% of sales as 142,185 is 9.41 % of all players (1,510,998) and estimated sales of 3 million copies.
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$250k is an arbitrary cut-off. You may find that of those 30 games, some still lost money, some paid dev costs and made a profit, and some may be multi-million dollar success stories.
It's also tricky to properly account for VR revenues. Are Elite Dangerous sales VR sales if they're bought by someone with a VR headset, played on a VR headset or played once on a VR headset then not again?
Without the full sales picture for those games it's not sensible to assume they only barely cleared the $250k mark.
VR is the future (Score:1)
Where 3d TV failed and why it doesn't translate (Score:4, Interesting)
3DTV has one fundamental flaw: It doesn't add to the experience. You're still watching a movie. Basically, to translate it to VR, that would mean that you're still playing Civilization or Tabletop Simulator, but watch the game float in front of you instead of looking at it on a screen. If that was all VR is, yes, it would be doomed to fail. Because for that experience, the overhead is WAY too high. Setting up the whole equipment, in a room that's more or less dedicated to playing, wearing a VR helmet, all that just to get an experience that may be fun the first 3 times but loses its gimmicky charm soon, that won't fly.
VR is much, much more, though. Yes, there are games that are essentially banking on being gimmicky versions of normal games, but there are also experiences you cannot sensibly duplicate on old school gaming hardware. There is that lightsaber game, or a game where you climb up houses, games where being able to experience 360 degrees is vital to the whole game and so on.
New technologies in gaming have often been used wrongly. Why? Because all that was tried was to cram the same games into the new technology. Often with subpar results. Whether it was different input devices or some gimmicky toys (powerglove, anyone?), what most of them did, and what still a lot of VR game developers do, was to try to cram the old formula into the new technology. That can only fail. Because the formula has already been optimized to fit the technology that exists. You will not create the better RTS game in VR. At least not if you offer the same interface that is optimized for keyboard/mouse/screen gaming. If you can add the VR component, then we're talking. How about a "god-game" where your believers actually react to where you stand, towering over them? Or a strategic game where you actually ARE the general and your troops actually react to you being "there" with them?
VR games will, at least in my expectation, be less defined about how you play something different but way more about immersion than games were so far. To expand on the "general" example from above, contemporary games already allow you to play Napoleon, sit on your hill and send dispatch riders to your troops. VR will allow you to really experience this, with full 3D audio and the fully immersive experience of "being there". The quality of the experience would be a vastly different one. And this can actually be true for any kind of game, from sports to RTS to jumpscares, whatever your preferred genre, the experience will be vastly more immersive.
What will make or break VR, though, is whether we find new genres that only make sense on VR. Like I said earlier, there are a few experiences you cannot sensibly duplicate without VR. That would be basically all experiences where a full body simulation enhances the experience or even makes it possible in the first place altogether. The lightsaber game from earlier would be a good example. There isn't really a sensible way you can implement something like this with mouse/keyboard input or controller input. It just won't get the same feel to it.
Sigh. (Score:2)
Oh, no, that's only $7.5m!
God what a flop for software-only sales!
How on Earth do you manage to spin an article/summary/headline like that?
Especially when I cannot name ONE AAA VR title yet.
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It's very unlikely that we will see AAA VR titles any time soon. Simply because the market is by no means big enough yet to be interesting for AAA developers.
AAA titles have to sell in the millions or at least close to it to recoup investment. That's by no means possible now. In November, Valve announced "more than" 140k Vive units sold. Let's say they sold 200k by now. And let's add as many Occulus, and throw in another 100k "others". That would mean that there is a world wide market of half a million unit
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It's very unlikely that we will see AAA VR titles any time soon
Resident Evil 7
Dirt Rally
both on PSVR
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Ok, so what we'll see (and what we do already see) is games that can be played in VR too, but, and that's the key difference here, with conventional inputs.
What you get here is a "pseudo-VR", where you do gain 360 vision but with still exactly the same controller-based input.
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If you claim that a fully functioning HoloDeck is the only "true" VR then yes, I would agree.
VR is where it's at. AR is going to flop. (Score:2)
First off, anyone who has tried a Vive gets blown away. Even the stupid demo applications are hella impressive. When you play something like Project CARS or DCS, it's very difficult to communicate how real the depth is, and how immersive the full room simulation and tracking makes the experience.
Second, it's not just gamers and technical people. My wife, who never has expressed any interest in any video game ever, is bugging me to get the wireless adapter so she can play Holopoint more. Which she routinely
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There's enough of them out there that you can ask an early adopter.
PCs used to cost ten grand, remember?
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Fad (Score:2)
VR is a fad - like 3D movies. Too much faffing around for mainstream appeal.
The VR Experience (Score:2)
The problem with VR is twofold:
1) The cost of the hardware required to run it is still pretty steep. This is something you really can't just skimp on if you want decent frame rates. Expect to build a system worthy of the " gaming rig " title if you want a decent experience.
2) Due to the first problem, there aren't as many folks buying VR titles. As a result, the developers are hesitant to pour money and resources into the creation of the titles as they will have a difficult time recouping the costs. T
There are less than 30 decent games... (Score:2)
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Bad metric (Score:2)
Comparing successful games to the number of not-as-successful games is a bad metric. There's lots of shovelware VR titles just like there is any other open platform. There's also a lot of low-cost games that aren't trying to make AAA money.
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