For a good spectrum of opinions, compare the Chicago Daily Herald ("the first VR gadget you might actually buy") to The Week Magazine who say straight out that the Oculus Go can't save VR:
The biggest knock against VR is that its ultimate goal is complete immersion, sucking you into whatever entertainment experience you happen to be experiencing. First, there are obvious practical troubles like being unaware of what is going on around you without the normal benefit of peripheral vision or hearing.
More importantly, however, is that a lot of the proposed software for VR is actually pointless. While immersion has always been the aim of video games — and thus offers VR's most compelling use case — most of the other things we want to do with tech aren't actually improved by putting a headset on. The idea of watching Netflix in a virtual room with friends are in a plain sense significantly worse than watching Netflix on a couch on a TV, and repeat failed experiments like Playstation Home. Yes, in theory, having a Skype chat with someone in VR may seem as if it would be more immediate, but it's likely just more cumbersome and difficult than doing it on a phone. Even VR games would require significantly more effort than playing Angry Birds on your phone, again constraining the usefulness of technology.
The point is that VR is at best a niche platform because unlike other forms of tech, it asks you to rebuild your behavior around it. Rather than being some next mainstream wave, its actual uses will likely be in more technical situations, such as skills training, education, or in situations like museums. What it will almost certainly not be is akin to the smartphone: a ubiquitous piece of technology that promises to become used by most of the world's population soon.As a quick aside, it's nice to see someone else making the same comparison to smartphones that I've been making from the outset.
Useless and doomed as it is, though, VR is still an industry with lots of large companies throwing boatloads of cash at the concept, and industry analysts are still forecasting great success for VR... any day now... really... in spite of the fact that the goalposts of success keep changing. The ever-bullish Superdata, in particular, have previously claimed that VR would be worth $30 billion a year by 2020, (although they also claimed that Google's Daydream would move 450K units last year, which didn't happen), and are back again with their vision of what success would mean for the Go:
Superdata sees a market forming for the Oculus Go stand-alone VR headset. The market intelligence firm's latest quarterly cross-reality report on the VR, AR, and MR scene forecasts 2018 shipments of 1.81 million for the just-launched $200 device.
That would make it the market-leading headset of the year outside of the $20 Google Cardboard shell. Superdata expects the next best performing headset to be the PlayStation VR with 1.47 million sold, followed at a distance by Samsung Gear VR shipments of 590,000.Just to recap: Superdata, who forecast 450K in 2017 sales for Google's Daydream only to see Daydream fall well short of that number, are now forecasting 1.47M units in 2018 sales for Oculus Go. I wonder what will happen? Place your bets!
Or don't, since we already know what will happen. Oculus Go will not move 1.47M units. Oculus won't move 1.47M VR headsets in total, including both the Rift and the Go. I love that Superdata are forecasting 1.47M units sold rather than 1.5M, though, as if they're measuring sales that have already happened rather than pulling a wild-ass guess right out of their nether regions.