VR won't be a "meaningful" part of interactive entertainment for YEARS, according to SONY

Among all the languishing and failed VR products, Sony's PlayStation VR stands out as the closest thing VR has to a success story. Sure, Google's Cardboard VR or Samsung's Gear VR may have moved more units, but PSVR has handily outsold all integrated-display VR headsets, combined. The problem is that even those industry-leading sales numbers are far below VR's early projections; worse yet, they were entirely front-loaded, with basically nobody buying in after that first wave of early adopters.

PSVR fans kept showing up for E3, year after year, hoping for a big VR announcement from Sony, only to leave disappointed. The next-gen PS5, which will land in stores only days from today equipped with more than enough grunt for VR, does have a camera module available for sale, but it isn't PSVR-compatible; if you want to use your last-gen PSVR with the next-gen PS5, you'll need an adapter. The only thing that could speak more loudly to VR being low on the priority list for Sony would be some sort of official statement to that effect, from Sony themselves.

And now, as reported by The Washington Post, we have exactly that:

Though immersion appears to be the focal point of Sony’s PS5 push, Ryan says there won’t be any immediate leaps forward from Sony in the most immersive gaming experience, virtual reality (VR). PlayStation was at the forefront of the virtual reality market for consoles, having launched a PSVR headset in 2016. While 5 million headsets were sold by January this year, sales were slowing in 2020. There are currently no public plans for a PS5-specific headset. Instead, Sony is offering adapters to use the PS4′s PSVR headset with the new console.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”

And that, as they say, is that. The most successful player in the VR game has no plans for a next play, anytime in the near-to-foreseeable future. Stick a fork in VR, folks; it's done.

VR apologists will likely look to Ryan's "at some stage"/"in the future" remarks as signs of life, but don't be fooled; that's just the corpse, twitching. Sony has to say something to assure buzzword-sensitive investors that they haven't given up on one of tech's juicier buzzwords, because admitting that VR's years-long campaign is ending in defeat could cause the share price of whoever admits it first to drop sharply, something which Sony would rather avoid. 

But their reluctance to flee the VR field first should not be mistaken for a desire to keep fighting the VR fight; Sony is done with VR, unless and until somebody else succeeds in convincing consumers to adopt the technology en masse. With the second-biggest player being Facebook VR née Oculus, who have nailed their VR fortunes to the larger platform's declining user count, that's looking less and less likely to happen.

Of all the companies doing VR business, the only one that might have been making money from VR was Sony. What we've now learned is that even Sony are not making enough money from VR for the tech to be worth any more investment. 

Oh, sure, Facebook and Valve have deep enough pockets that they can probably continue to lose money on VR for a while yet, but don't expect that to propel VR into the forefront of the public consciousness; it won't, and neither will the upcoming Ready Player Two (the sequel to VR-advert/movie Ready Player One, which also didn't more the needle on VR).

It's all over save the shouting; how long the likes of Facebook and Valve will keep shouting into the VR void remains to be seen.

A busy week for corporate bullshit

After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"

Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.