From AndroidHeadlines.com:
Valve’s President Gabe Newell said that the virtual reality (VR) industry still needs time to develop. While speaking to reporters at an informal meeting earlier this week, Newell made some surprising comments about the HTC Vive headset that Valve helped develop. After acknowledging that the Vive is the most expensive VR headset on the market, Valve’s chief said that “it’s barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience.” As such, the VR ecosystem that Valve and HTC are currently trying to build will still need more time to grow and fulfill its potential, provided that ever happens.
The famous entrepreneur compared the current VR industry to the PC market of the 1980s in the sense that people were originally buying PCs without really understanding what they can be used for. Those types of consumers are also now driving the growth of VR hardware sales, Newell believes, adding that VR will hopefully end up being as successful as PCs were and still are. [...] Valve’s chief also said VR hardware sales are currently inhibited by the general lack of content, adding that there’s currently not a single VR game on the market that could be considered a system-seller.
Newell’s comments are somewhat similar to those recently given by Mark Zuckerberg who said that the Facebook-owned Oculus has yet to develop “good virtual reality.” Overall, it seems that most major players in the industry are still cautiously optimistic about this technology, but everyone is apparently waiting for third-party developers to start making more high-quality experiences for VR hardware. Given that state of affairs, it’s possible that the VR industry is in for another slow year in terms of growth.
OK, a few things about this:
1. PCs in the '80s absolutely could do things right out of the box, which is why people bought them. Among other things, they could run word processor and spreadsheet software (useful for business), and play games (already very popular). They were even simple enough to program for that users could write their own programs for them, and were encouraged to do so; Commodore computers (also very popular at the time) all came with BASIC built-in, and manuals on BASIC programming. PCs in the '80s were not nearly as hard to sell as VR headets are today.
2. Hype drove early sales of VR; now that the hype has died, nothing is driving them. PlayStation VR sales dropped off a cliff after some early success, and the only VR headsets that have moved more than a million units are Gear VR and Google Cardboard, both of which managed to get to market last spring, while the hype was still hot and VR's many issues not front and centre in the coverage. And those are the VR success stories; none of the other VR headsets is anywhere close to doing as well as those three. The hype is over now; all of VR's recent PR has been bad, and the only people still bullish about VR's future are people who've invested heavily in VR succeeding.
3. VR cannot afford another slow year in sales. VR is a hardware purchase, and not just a software purchase or a Cloud-based service, and one that really doesn't sell itself -- even VR's proponents admit that it needs to be experienced in order to make converts. Except that BestBuy is closing hundreds of Oculus Rift demo stations because nobody wanted to try them. The clock is ticking: retailers like BestBuy can't afford to stock VR headsets that aren't selling. If VR hardware doesn't start to show sales performance soon, stores will stop carrying the gear, and that will be the end of the story for this generation of VR hardware.
4. VR isn't going to see a flood of third-party development unless they can improve the headsets' adoption rate. There's no money to made developing for VR, because there aren't enough users in the marketplace who can buy VR content. Given how little interest consumers have for VR, and give how expensive it is to develop for VR, third-party developers just can't afford to develop for VR right now. Which may be why Valve has three VR games in the works for the HTC Vive that they helped develop: nobody else is going to make games for the thing, so they have to.It is noteworthy that GabeN is willing to be so candid about VR's issues. Zuckerberg's original comments were made in response to questioning, under oath, during the ZenMax v. Oculus trial; he later expanded on them while trying to calm shareholders' concerns about the Oculus purchase, basically pleading with them to be patient after his blunt admission that Facebook would lose money for years trying to make VR a thing. In other words, his comments happened because he had no choice in the matter; he couldn't refuse to answer the question at trial, and he really was forced to do damage control afterward.
GabeN wasn't in that situation. His comments were volunteered during an informal meeting. That's a little amazing, when you think about it, and goes to illustrate why gamers hold such a high opinion of the man. Zuckerberg would never have commented about the current state of VR if he hadn't been forced to; GabeN, by comparison, is publicly musing about how he's OK with it, if VR fails, no matter how much money Valve would end up flushing along the way.
None of that changes VR's fundamental issue, though. The tech simply isn't ready, and the content simply isn't there. And with retailers already starting to check out of the VR gold rush, VR developers, hardware and content, are running out of time to turn it around.