From gamesindustry.biz:
Dean Hall, CEO of RocketWerkz and previously lead designer of DayZ, has spoken openly on Reddit about the harsh financial realities of VR development, explaining that without the subsidies provided by platform exclusives and other mechanisms, the medium would currently be largely unviable.
In an extended post which has garnered over 200 comments, Hall proclaimed that there was simply "no money" in VR game development, explaining that even though his VR title Out of Ammo had sold better than expected, it remained unprofitable.
Hall believes that many consumer expectations from the mature and well-supported PC market have carried over to VR, with customers not fully comprehending the challenges involved with producing content for such a small install base.
[...]
"I laugh now when people say or tweet me things like 'I can't wait to see what your next VR game will be!' Honestly, I don't think I want to make any more VR games. Our staff who work on VR games all want to rotate off after their work is done. Privately, developers have been talking about this but nobody seems to feel comfortable talking about it publicly - which I think will ultimately be bad."
It's not a universal opinion among VR developers, however: there was opposition to Hall's points both within and beyond the thread. Sam Watts, Operations Lead at Make Real had the following to say.
"I think the reality of that thread is a direct result of a perceived gold rush by developers of all sizes to a degree, since analyst predictions around sales volumes of units were far higher than the reality towards the end of the year. There have been waves of gold rush perceptions with VR over the past few years, mostly around each release of new hardware expecting the next boom to take the technology into the mainstream, which has mostly failed to materialise.
"For us it became clear that the rise of VR would be gradual rather than explosive when in 2015, it was revealed that the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive would be released in 2016 and that the gold rush would be on hold."
It seems that VR's gold rush is already over, having not even properly started yet. And that's according to someone who's still bullish on VR; according to those whose enthusiasm is starting to wane, the situation is more dire still.
The problem with VR development is simple: VR is too expensive, and not useful enough, to have attracted a large user base, and without a large installed user base, it's simply not profitable to make VR content. Anyone wanting to develop for VR needs to be willing to lose money doing so, for the foreseeable future, in order to build a library of top-notch VR content that will attract reluctant consumers into dropping hundreds of dollars on an otherwise useless peripheral device.
The question is not, will VR lose money for years? The question is, who will lose money on VR for years? Who can afford to lose money on VR for years, hoping that they can make it back later, if and when a user base has finally been established for these devices? So far, nobody's really stepping forward in any big way, and even Facebook/Oculus seem to be reluctant to really put the kind of money into VR content development that they have into the tech itself. Until that happens, the growth of VR's content library will continue to be slow.