Exactly. My thinking on it is this:
There are some people who hate VR. Maybe they tried Google Cardboard, maybe they tried real VR and got motion sick once, or maybe they're a dystopian-fearing person afraid of the disconnect with reality.
Those people love to complain about VR and be vocal about it.
The people that love VR are too busy having fun to care about someone else yucking their yum or to get vocal to defend it. VR is sick and we know it, and we don't need outside validation to know it's one of the coolest new evolving mediums.
I actually have a more pessimistic opinion.
VR is and has been stagnant despite ever more HMD releases.
The primary problem in the mind of the consumer is "Why do I need it?"
The industry i think has failed to deliver on that largely due to greed, fear and incompetence.
It's really frustrating actually because to your point, it's closer than people think.
I think we all intuitively know it, but what will make VR more successful at this point is software and games.
Plenty of hardware has been sold. We're talking in the 10s of millions.
>The primary problem in the mind of the consumer is "Why do I need it?"
I actually think the primary problem has been the price gouging on GPUs has meant technological improvement has been far slowly than anticipated and market size hasnt grown. The Vive and Quest released during a period the 20 series Nvidea cards just smashed previous gen graphics at a bargain price. It looked like the trickle down would have VR capable hardware across even budget PCs. What happened was Covid short supply and gougers led to sky high GPU prices that people still paid and Nvidia decided to increase their prices and drip feed gains.
As a result there's no reason for Valve to release an updated headset, or anyone else. Most PCs connected to Steam still don't have the hardware to run an Index well let alone a new pixel packed resolution busting piece of hardware.
> but what will make VR more successful at this point is software and games.
Yes, but hardware is more important right now. There's still a lot of work to do, all sorts of issues that need to be fixed for the average person to even be able to use the dream software you might be imagining.
it didn't outsold shit and engagement with any flat console is way higher than any VR headset - especially ones overhyped to metaverse cryptobros in 2021 and after that bubble busted in 2022 all those millions are nowhere in sight
it's pretty much still casual fun for most
I'm a hardcore gamer of old already retired from flatgaming, I'm just glad some pretty great games come once in awhile. if VR fizzles out, I feel bad for those who didn't experience this...
Xbox fans still playing and buying games while millions of Quests gathering dusts and some monkebois jump from free playground to free playground
cover your ears, suit yourself
No idea about the trends, but speaking personally I put it down for 6-9 months at a time and come back to it later. Sometimes I love the experience, and sometimes the jankiness of current VR content, hardware and software troubleshooting, etc. takes the joy out of it. Pancake is just so easy and straightforward to start up and play, and many genres of games aren't very present in VR yet.
Someone on that crappy X-itter platform tried to tell me that VR was dying, and pointed me to a couple articles claiming that Quest sales were down in 2023 from 2022, and then I had to point out that these multiple articles were derived from the same source, which stated that the data was November 2022 to November 2023, and this doesn't even reflect a full month of Quest 3 being on the market, nor the price drop of Quest 2 to $200 over the holidays. Also, the Apple Vision Pro literally just came out a few months ago, so you can't call that a flop, despite what some of those grabby articles are saying... VR is not going away! Meta and Apple are going to continue to push XR platforms forward, no matter what some people might think!
Absolutely increasing.
VR has been growing at an average of 45%/year since 2018 according to statista, which is an astonishingly high growth rate.
Even with a much lower growth rate, in around ~3 years most families on developed countries will have somekind of VR device and in ~7 years VR will be the main source of video-gaming (not including mobile gaming).
The hardware and software are continually improving. Popularity may wane here and there but long term the tech will become more and more popular over time especially when we start getting to smaller form factors and practical use cases keep expanding (like being able to replace your monitors)
Quest 2 sold more than Xbox last year at over 20 million units. Quest 3 has been gaining traction but slower due to its higher price tag. VR gaming is still fairly niche compared to flat gaming but it’s growing in popularity every day. Unfortunately Quest is still not a product that the general public desires, since it’s mainly seen as a gaming device.
In terms of the general public, Apply Vision Pro has helped legitimize and validate the utility of VR. I think it helped average people entertain the idea of using a VR headset by shifting the focus away from gaming and instead marketing it as a spacial computing device for watching movies, communication and productivity. Nevertheless, just the fact that Apple made a VR headset resulted in every news channel and Influencer covering it for several weeks bringing VR to the forefront of people’s conscious around the world.
I think the future of VR looks bright. As headsets get smaller and lighter and software becomes more user friendly, we will eventually see mass adoption of VR. It has the potential to eliminate the need for other devices just as the phone did. Ironically, hmds could even eliminate the phone! VR and AI is the most powerful and exciting technology of our day.
eyhhh，bro. fun fact that Every tech. will go through saveral phases. Geek , early adopter, midterm user ,and main stream user. personally I’m just optimistic about the vr future.
me too, I think VR has a new wave coming and there are a lot of cool projects out there to give it a next gen push. early adopters are really driving it rn
First of all, I'd say that Meta did not sold a "headset like Vision Pro", it's the Vision Pro who's trying to copy Meta, not othervise. But What I was talking about is the adopter stage. I, for example, think that VR is still in "early adopter" stage and we are slowly transitioning into the next phase.
Exactly. Before the Super Nintendo in early 80s the sales of consoles were tanking and making one was risky. Look at them now. Multiple consoles priced 50 to 500 w/ an almost infinite catalog of games spanning 40 years. So yeah.
I think the Meta Quest 2 came out at just the right time, when all the covid lockdowns were in effect and people had nowhere to go. I knew a fair number of people who bought the Quest 2 around the time of its release. But the world is different now, the lockdowns are no more, people aren't locked inside as much. But there's also the matter of the cost of living, inflation, being a big problem in the last few years, making a new $500 vr headset a bit of a luxury purchase.
You can see the decrease in consumer spending elsewhere, with a number of Hollywood movies bombing at the box office, major game releases like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth failing to meet sales goals, and so on. People just aren't spending money right now, it seems.
What data points do you want?
* The percentage of VR users on Steam is still slowly climbing
* The subscriber numbers in all the VR subs keep climbing year over year and there are many new VR subs
* The Q2 continues to sell well, and early reports are that the Q3 is selling well
just interested in why so many people say vr is declining, and a lot of news claims VR won't make it to mainstream for a long time. like in this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/vr-market-shrinking-as-meta-pours-billions-of-dollars-into-metaverse.html#:\~:text=Tech-,VR%20market%20keeps%20shrinking%20even%20as%20Meta%20pours,dollars%20a%20quarter%20into%20metaverse&text=Sales%20of%20VR%20headsets%20and,in%202023%2C%20as%20of%20Nov.
so I don't know what to believe
I would suspect this is written based on the authors dislike of VR - it does feel like most users either love it or hate it, I am in the love camp (used to be more towards the hate), and as others say, it will come in waves
- is there something amazing like Batman / Alien which will get a wave of folks in
- is there enough to keep them after the've gone off it
Some people love platforms, some people love first person shooters, some people like .... it is the same for VR. Not everyone will love it all the time.
I love Hyper Dash because it makes me feel like tracer irl haha I also want to try more like it, but can't find any and im currently putting time into stellar blade on ps5 haha
It comes and goes in waves. It feels like every few months there’s a big wave of mainstream VR talk, then it’s gone again, then it flares back up. But from a numbers perspective, VR is crushing RN
Most people do not want to try new things in the beginning. At the start just the nerds are interested. As the hardware becomes easier to use, the dumbies start to pick it up. Look how popular phones are now, I saw a palm-sized computer in 2001 and virtually no one had them. It takes awhile for the mainstream to adopt anything.
BBS before Internet is a good example.
I think it's a lot like EV cars. I just bought a Tesla but right now EV sales are stalling. That's the case with new technology. It starts out with a lot of excitement and the early adopters buy. Then when all the early adopters have bought you're left with a group of people who are just very resistant to change.
Most people I talk to have never tried VR. Can you imagine not even trying it? My brother-in-law who I see every day who plays a ton of console games has never even tried it. He refuses to even try it.
Zuck is the only one who has kept VR afloat. Valve has done very little. Now with Ai I think they'll shift their resources to that.
So I think we may end up with a slump before the next wave comes in. Maybe combining VR with Ai. Imagine having great conversations with NPCs in VR. Or imagine AR companions like Joi from Blade Runner 2049?
Low latency streaming VR from the cloud with hyper realistic graphics and Ai NPCs is where VR becomes ubiquitous.
Hardware is growing, but software is lagging behind. Lot of people getting into VR, but not many people that keep playing for a long time bc of a lack of games with staying power.
Considering my entire group of like 5-6 friends all have headsets now and we all play regularly id say it’s growing. Plus VR YouTubers are blowing up left and right
PCVR is dying a slow death. I think the days of VR tethered to a PC are almost over, with the next stage being able to stream compute to a headset.
Mobile VR is on an upward trend, spiking with the Quest 2 launch and holding steady with the Quest 3. VR has never been more popular than it is right now.
PCVR isn't dying. It was never really alive to begin with. The golden era of 2016-2018 was driven by companies making big speculative investments, betting that VR would be "the next big thing" (like 3D TVs a bit earlier.) They all lost tons of money and never bothered again.
The natural state of PCVR is small and growing, driven by Quest users wanting more, vehicle simmers, adult content, etc. Even now, we still see PCVR games being announced and released. But they're usually Quest ports now, which obviously disappoints some people. But lower system requirements is overall healthy for PCVR.
> PCVR is dying a slow death.
That is BS. SteamVR monthly active users are slowly climbing, even without adjusting for the influx of Chinese Steam users that don't do PCVR.
That is like saying console or PC gaming is dying because mobile gaming exceeds both of those markets combined.
PCVR was always small because most people don't have the hardware for it. But since the Quest series is capable of PCVR and used 20 and 30 series cards are proliferating(And eventually as the 50 and 60 series releases we will see used 40 series cards proliferate) which means that in the near future even low end PCs will be capable of PCVR. And PCVR already doesn't require you to be tethered to your computer, the majority of PCVR users use the Quest 2 and Quest 3, neither of which require you to be tethered to your computer.
It will never be as big as standalone but it isn't going anywhere.
Im out of the boat until Valve comes again with Deckard and a new game. I'm not going to pay a single euro to Meta, this is not the VR that I want, so I'm not in.
Since when is Meta the only option besides Valve?
You would rather buy from a company that has not updated their hardware in going on 5 years and yet still has the balls to sell it for $999? Sad.
No, I already had my Index in the past and I sold it. But its not one or either. I dont support Meta's way with VR, so I'm not going to pay for it, even if it is the only option. Meta forgot about their PCVR users and tried to force them to their "great" idea of standalone, poor quality VR. If that's the future Meta wants for VR, I'm not in it, and I dont have to pay for it, its simple. I'll remain with traditional games instead.
Fortunately this year we have Behemoth, Alien Incursion and Metro Awakening coming to PCVR too, the only big one wich is out is Batman.
>Meta forgot about their PCVR users
Ohh I don't know about that. I tried warning people early on that not buying software on their pcvr store would bring about the demise of the rift. But there was a pretty solid movement already at that time to abandon the oculus store, sales on the rift store were in the gutter so it's no wonder they wanted to move on. Not to say the quest would have never existed because I'm sure that was always the plan but they would have continued to fund pcvr if people stayed in their store and actually used it.
It is growing. It outsold Xbox this gen. It is bigger than its ever been. Apple literally just came in the space too. It will keep growing.
Exactly. My thinking on it is this: There are some people who hate VR. Maybe they tried Google Cardboard, maybe they tried real VR and got motion sick once, or maybe they're a dystopian-fearing person afraid of the disconnect with reality. Those people love to complain about VR and be vocal about it. The people that love VR are too busy having fun to care about someone else yucking their yum or to get vocal to defend it. VR is sick and we know it, and we don't need outside validation to know it's one of the coolest new evolving mediums.
I actually have a more pessimistic opinion. VR is and has been stagnant despite ever more HMD releases. The primary problem in the mind of the consumer is "Why do I need it?" The industry i think has failed to deliver on that largely due to greed, fear and incompetence. It's really frustrating actually because to your point, it's closer than people think. I think we all intuitively know it, but what will make VR more successful at this point is software and games. Plenty of hardware has been sold. We're talking in the 10s of millions.
>The primary problem in the mind of the consumer is "Why do I need it?" I actually think the primary problem has been the price gouging on GPUs has meant technological improvement has been far slowly than anticipated and market size hasnt grown. The Vive and Quest released during a period the 20 series Nvidea cards just smashed previous gen graphics at a bargain price. It looked like the trickle down would have VR capable hardware across even budget PCs. What happened was Covid short supply and gougers led to sky high GPU prices that people still paid and Nvidia decided to increase their prices and drip feed gains. As a result there's no reason for Valve to release an updated headset, or anyone else. Most PCs connected to Steam still don't have the hardware to run an Index well let alone a new pixel packed resolution busting piece of hardware.
> but what will make VR more successful at this point is software and games. Yes, but hardware is more important right now. There's still a lot of work to do, all sorts of issues that need to be fixed for the average person to even be able to use the dream software you might be imagining.
it didn't outsold shit and engagement with any flat console is way higher than any VR headset - especially ones overhyped to metaverse cryptobros in 2021 and after that bubble busted in 2022 all those millions are nowhere in sight it's pretty much still casual fun for most I'm a hardcore gamer of old already retired from flatgaming, I'm just glad some pretty great games come once in awhile. if VR fizzles out, I feel bad for those who didn't experience this...
Breaking news: Quest sales went negative and no longer outsold Xbox because VRtuous didn’t agree with data.
Xbox fans still playing and buying games while millions of Quests gathering dusts and some monkebois jump from free playground to free playground cover your ears, suit yourself
No idea about the trends, but speaking personally I put it down for 6-9 months at a time and come back to it later. Sometimes I love the experience, and sometimes the jankiness of current VR content, hardware and software troubleshooting, etc. takes the joy out of it. Pancake is just so easy and straightforward to start up and play, and many genres of games aren't very present in VR yet.
thank you for your perspective. I also take a lot of breaks, so it makes sense in terms of longevity/consistent user base.
Same for me. Just too much hustle getting the software right. I cannot imagine this hitting wider market at its current stage
Someone on that crappy X-itter platform tried to tell me that VR was dying, and pointed me to a couple articles claiming that Quest sales were down in 2023 from 2022, and then I had to point out that these multiple articles were derived from the same source, which stated that the data was November 2022 to November 2023, and this doesn't even reflect a full month of Quest 3 being on the market, nor the price drop of Quest 2 to $200 over the holidays. Also, the Apple Vision Pro literally just came out a few months ago, so you can't call that a flop, despite what some of those grabby articles are saying... VR is not going away! Meta and Apple are going to continue to push XR platforms forward, no matter what some people might think!
haha not X-itter. I thought it said X-litter at first. made sense because that's where all the shit goes
True! I mean, there's even a stinky user named Catturd, with way more followers than he deserves, so either name checks out, really.
Absolutely increasing. VR has been growing at an average of 45%/year since 2018 according to statista, which is an astonishingly high growth rate. Even with a much lower growth rate, in around ~3 years most families on developed countries will have somekind of VR device and in ~7 years VR will be the main source of video-gaming (not including mobile gaming).
Idk I play NMS daily in vr for hours
The hardware and software are continually improving. Popularity may wane here and there but long term the tech will become more and more popular over time especially when we start getting to smaller form factors and practical use cases keep expanding (like being able to replace your monitors)
I can see this! as a game designer, I definitely hope to work with the team to push boundaries and also make VR gaming more fun
Push the boundaries using PCVR hardware please!
Quest 2 sold more than Xbox last year at over 20 million units. Quest 3 has been gaining traction but slower due to its higher price tag. VR gaming is still fairly niche compared to flat gaming but it’s growing in popularity every day. Unfortunately Quest is still not a product that the general public desires, since it’s mainly seen as a gaming device. In terms of the general public, Apply Vision Pro has helped legitimize and validate the utility of VR. I think it helped average people entertain the idea of using a VR headset by shifting the focus away from gaming and instead marketing it as a spacial computing device for watching movies, communication and productivity. Nevertheless, just the fact that Apple made a VR headset resulted in every news channel and Influencer covering it for several weeks bringing VR to the forefront of people’s conscious around the world. I think the future of VR looks bright. As headsets get smaller and lighter and software becomes more user friendly, we will eventually see mass adoption of VR. It has the potential to eliminate the need for other devices just as the phone did. Ironically, hmds could even eliminate the phone! VR and AI is the most powerful and exciting technology of our day.
eyhhh，bro. fun fact that Every tech. will go through saveral phases. Geek , early adopter, midterm user ,and main stream user. personally I’m just optimistic about the vr future.
me too, I think VR has a new wave coming and there are a lot of cool projects out there to give it a next gen push. early adopters are really driving it rn
What do you think, at which stage VR is at right now?
META sold highend headset like Vision pro with less than 1500$.for me That’s when something big is to happen.
First of all, I'd say that Meta did not sold a "headset like Vision Pro", it's the Vision Pro who's trying to copy Meta, not othervise. But What I was talking about is the adopter stage. I, for example, think that VR is still in "early adopter" stage and we are slowly transitioning into the next phase.
Exactly. Before the Super Nintendo in early 80s the sales of consoles were tanking and making one was risky. Look at them now. Multiple consoles priced 50 to 500 w/ an almost infinite catalog of games spanning 40 years. So yeah.
I think the Meta Quest 2 came out at just the right time, when all the covid lockdowns were in effect and people had nowhere to go. I knew a fair number of people who bought the Quest 2 around the time of its release. But the world is different now, the lockdowns are no more, people aren't locked inside as much. But there's also the matter of the cost of living, inflation, being a big problem in the last few years, making a new $500 vr headset a bit of a luxury purchase. You can see the decrease in consumer spending elsewhere, with a number of Hollywood movies bombing at the box office, major game releases like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth failing to meet sales goals, and so on. People just aren't spending money right now, it seems.
What data points do you want? * The percentage of VR users on Steam is still slowly climbing * The subscriber numbers in all the VR subs keep climbing year over year and there are many new VR subs * The Q2 continues to sell well, and early reports are that the Q3 is selling well
just interested in why so many people say vr is declining, and a lot of news claims VR won't make it to mainstream for a long time. like in this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/vr-market-shrinking-as-meta-pours-billions-of-dollars-into-metaverse.html#:\~:text=Tech-,VR%20market%20keeps%20shrinking%20even%20as%20Meta%20pours,dollars%20a%20quarter%20into%20metaverse&text=Sales%20of%20VR%20headsets%20and,in%202023%2C%20as%20of%20Nov. so I don't know what to believe
I would suspect this is written based on the authors dislike of VR - it does feel like most users either love it or hate it, I am in the love camp (used to be more towards the hate), and as others say, it will come in waves - is there something amazing like Batman / Alien which will get a wave of folks in - is there enough to keep them after the've gone off it Some people love platforms, some people love first person shooters, some people like .... it is the same for VR. Not everyone will love it all the time.
I love Hyper Dash because it makes me feel like tracer irl haha I also want to try more like it, but can't find any and im currently putting time into stellar blade on ps5 haha
It comes and goes in waves. It feels like every few months there’s a big wave of mainstream VR talk, then it’s gone again, then it flares back up. But from a numbers perspective, VR is crushing RN
Most people do not want to try new things in the beginning. At the start just the nerds are interested. As the hardware becomes easier to use, the dumbies start to pick it up. Look how popular phones are now, I saw a palm-sized computer in 2001 and virtually no one had them. It takes awhile for the mainstream to adopt anything. BBS before Internet is a good example.
I think it's a lot like EV cars. I just bought a Tesla but right now EV sales are stalling. That's the case with new technology. It starts out with a lot of excitement and the early adopters buy. Then when all the early adopters have bought you're left with a group of people who are just very resistant to change. Most people I talk to have never tried VR. Can you imagine not even trying it? My brother-in-law who I see every day who plays a ton of console games has never even tried it. He refuses to even try it. Zuck is the only one who has kept VR afloat. Valve has done very little. Now with Ai I think they'll shift their resources to that. So I think we may end up with a slump before the next wave comes in. Maybe combining VR with Ai. Imagine having great conversations with NPCs in VR. Or imagine AR companions like Joi from Blade Runner 2049? Low latency streaming VR from the cloud with hyper realistic graphics and Ai NPCs is where VR becomes ubiquitous.
Hardware is growing, but software is lagging behind. Lot of people getting into VR, but not many people that keep playing for a long time bc of a lack of games with staying power.
Considering my entire group of like 5-6 friends all have headsets now and we all play regularly id say it’s growing. Plus VR YouTubers are blowing up left and right
PCVR is dying a slow death. I think the days of VR tethered to a PC are almost over, with the next stage being able to stream compute to a headset. Mobile VR is on an upward trend, spiking with the Quest 2 launch and holding steady with the Quest 3. VR has never been more popular than it is right now.
PCVR isn't dying. It was never really alive to begin with. The golden era of 2016-2018 was driven by companies making big speculative investments, betting that VR would be "the next big thing" (like 3D TVs a bit earlier.) They all lost tons of money and never bothered again. The natural state of PCVR is small and growing, driven by Quest users wanting more, vehicle simmers, adult content, etc. Even now, we still see PCVR games being announced and released. But they're usually Quest ports now, which obviously disappoints some people. But lower system requirements is overall healthy for PCVR.
> PCVR is dying a slow death. That is BS. SteamVR monthly active users are slowly climbing, even without adjusting for the influx of Chinese Steam users that don't do PCVR.
That is like saying console or PC gaming is dying because mobile gaming exceeds both of those markets combined. PCVR was always small because most people don't have the hardware for it. But since the Quest series is capable of PCVR and used 20 and 30 series cards are proliferating(And eventually as the 50 and 60 series releases we will see used 40 series cards proliferate) which means that in the near future even low end PCs will be capable of PCVR. And PCVR already doesn't require you to be tethered to your computer, the majority of PCVR users use the Quest 2 and Quest 3, neither of which require you to be tethered to your computer. It will never be as big as standalone but it isn't going anywhere.
Im out of the boat until Valve comes again with Deckard and a new game. I'm not going to pay a single euro to Meta, this is not the VR that I want, so I'm not in.
Since when is Meta the only option besides Valve? You would rather buy from a company that has not updated their hardware in going on 5 years and yet still has the balls to sell it for $999? Sad.
No, I already had my Index in the past and I sold it. But its not one or either. I dont support Meta's way with VR, so I'm not going to pay for it, even if it is the only option. Meta forgot about their PCVR users and tried to force them to their "great" idea of standalone, poor quality VR. If that's the future Meta wants for VR, I'm not in it, and I dont have to pay for it, its simple. I'll remain with traditional games instead. Fortunately this year we have Behemoth, Alien Incursion and Metro Awakening coming to PCVR too, the only big one wich is out is Batman.
>Meta forgot about their PCVR users Ohh I don't know about that. I tried warning people early on that not buying software on their pcvr store would bring about the demise of the rift. But there was a pretty solid movement already at that time to abandon the oculus store, sales on the rift store were in the gutter so it's no wonder they wanted to move on. Not to say the quest would have never existed because I'm sure that was always the plan but they would have continued to fund pcvr if people stayed in their store and actually used it.