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As I’ve suggested in VR pieces over the past two weeks, the winner here is you, the lucky holdout. Now you can take the hundreds of dollars you saved by not buying a VR headset on day one and use them toward games — cheap games that similarly have been enjoyed by early adopters and fallen significantly in price since then.[Sigh.]
One more time, for those in the cheap seats: It doesn't matter that prices are dropping; VR prices haven't dropped significantly since August, when Oculus dropped the price on the Rift; HTC followed suit shortly afterwards, but VR headsets did not start leaping off shelves, and are still not selling quickly enough to justify any amount of optimism. That's because VR's problem is not its price point; its VR's lack of perceived value, at any price.
Truly transformative technologies all have obvious utility as a selling point. Even if it takes several iterations for the full scope of their potential usefulness to be realized, transformative technologies do something useful, right out of the box. The telegraph was obviously useful, as were the radio, the television, the personal computer, and the Internet.
The smartphone, which combined the power of a PC with the power of the Internet, all in a pocket-sized form-factor, was immediately and obviously useful. iPhones were expensive, of course, but that didn't stop people from borrowing to buy them; when Android lowered the smartphone's barrier to entry, so that basically everyone could afford one, that pent-up demand exploded.
The same thing did not happen with the iPad, though, or with 3DTVs or motion controllers. When Microsoft initially bundled the XBox One with the Kinect 2, it nearly sank their XBox division. The verdict was very clear: motion controllers were not useful, and their added expense was not worth any price... except to early adopters. And VR is just motion controls all over again, with extra sizzle.
Sony's re-purposing of the PlayStation Move set as the inputs for PSVR was clever, but it ultimately just combined an already-failed technology with one that's failing; sure, they've moved a couple of million units, but Nintendo sold 13.2 million WiiUs only to see that fail as a platform... and make no mistake, VR is a new platform. And a new platform needs to offer more to prospective users than VR versions of non-VR games.
Because that is what Venture Beat are pushing, here, as reasons to buy into VR: Batman: Arkham, Doom, Drive Club, Gran Turismo Sport, Resident Evil 7, Rez Inifinte, Superhot, Thumper, and Wipeout were all good games before they were VR games; even Eve: Valkyrie, which started as a VR-only title, now has a non-VR version, because CCP Games want to make some money on the thing, and too few people were buying into VR for that to happen unless they expanded to other platforms. It's great that these games' VR versions are also good, but they're good because these are all excellent games with or without VR; it's not because VR is inherently awesome enough to elevate otherwise mediocre material.
A transformative technology needs to have an obvious use; its entire pitch can't be based on non-obvious uses that haven't been found yet, because those uses may never be found. With no obvious use, VR has no evident value; and with no evident value, its perceived value per dollar spent is effectively zero. And it doesn't matter how low the price drops -- VR's value will continue to be effectively zero.
Which wouldn't necessarily prevent it from selling a bunch of units, anyway, as a novelty or fad... but if were going to happen, it would have happened two years ago when the VR hype was at its height. The hype is over; VR is still not useful, but it's also "old news," and unlikely to take off in spite of being useless.
If you've heavily invested in a VR venture... well, you have my pity, but don't say I didn't warn you. If you're not already bought in, and you also have balls of solid rock, then now might be a good time to start planning your short positions in VR-dependent ventures, provided they're publicly traded. But don't throw good money after bad, just because of the sunk cost fallacy, unless you have money to throw away on what is, at this point, a very long shot.