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.

In case you needed one, here's another reason not to buy an Oculus VR headset

 

As reported by The Verge:

Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account. [...]

Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. [...]

Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.

Yay?

If you're wondering why Facebook would possibly want to add even more barriers to entry in the way of VR adoption, in spite of the fact that almost nobody has a VR headset or cares about VR, the answer appears to be

a) consolidating Facebook’s management of its platforms, and

b) slightly simplifying the launch of Horizon, the social VR world that Facebook announced last year.

Of course, Facebook's disastrous record on privacy and data security makes 'a' problematic right out of the gate, and 'b' is only helpful is people care about Horizon... which is so thoroughly not a thing that even I hadn't heard about it, and I've been following this shit.

GG, Facebook! Well played. With most of your customers having bought those headsets only because they could also use them with Steam, you've now spiked your own sales, and probably the overall sales of VR headsets, for no other reason than sheer, monopolistic territoriality.

John Carmack jumps from VR to AI

I'm calling it right now: VR is dead. It's not, as someone tried to convince me recently, five to seven years away from breaking out, once they figure out exactly what socialization and spatial computing are and how VR can make them happen. No, VR is over; this generation of VR has failed.

For proof, look no further than John Carmack, who left id Software for Oculus because he was just that excited about the possibilities of VR, and who is now jumping off the VR ship before it sinks and takes him down with it. As reported by The Verge:

John Carmack, the chief technology officer of Facebook’s VR subsidiary Oculus, is stepping down this week. Carmack posted the news on Facebook today, saying he plans to focus his time instead on artificial general intelligence. He will remain in a “consulting CTO” position at Oculus, where he will “still have a voice” in the development work at the company.

Carmack will still work on some VR projects at Facebook, a spokesperson told Variety. In addition to general advisory tasks, for example, he will keep working on projects that maximize VR visual quality on lower-powered mobile hardware. However, he says that VR will “only be consuming a modest slice of my time” while he works on AI. “I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight,” he said of the subject. “I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.”

It was unclear whether the problem with no solution in sight referred to VR, or AI, or both.

People, if John freaking Carmack can't figure out what VR is good for, or how to convince skeptical consumers to buy in, then VR is probably doomed. Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus, couldn't solve this problem, either, and finally said that VR could be free and still not find any takers.

Google Stadia is an even worse deal than I thought

It looks like I may have one crucial detail of the Google Stadia package completely wrong.

Like many people, I was thinking that Stadia was basically "Netflix for Games," but if the team at Techlinked are correct, then Stadia may closer kin to XBox Game Pass, with a monthly fee that only gives access to a few free games, with major AAA titles being something you'll need to purchase separately in order to secure access outside of that free period.

This means that the US$1090 over 8 years cost of Stadia that I had calculated as being comparable to the average 8-year cost of console ownership is wrong. The Stadia actually costs US$1690 ($1090 for the service, plus $600 for the games), which amortizes over 8 years to US$211.25 per year, compared to the US$112.50 annual cost of console ownership over the same period. With the added disadvantage, for Stadia, that you own nothing at the end of those 8 years, compared to the console experience which leaves you with a console and 10 games that you own.

Much of Stadia's marketing is still deliberately vague, so clarification on these details could still emerge and magically make the whole thing suddenly awesome, but I doubt it. If this is indeed how Stadia will work, then Stadia... sucks. Even the free version won't actually be a new gaming paradigm; it'll just be a new digital distribution channel. Which nobody wanted. Mazel tov!

"Free is still not cheap enough"

I've been saying for some time now that the problem with VR wasn't its price point per se, but rather its lack of perceived value for money. There simply isn't enough that VR can do, which potential users want to do, and which they can't already do with devices that they already own. There is, in short, no reason for anyone to keep using VR after the initial wow factor wears off, a quality of current VR technology which led at least one analyst to label it as "drawerware."

That analyst and I are getting some backup, and the person backing us up might surprise you: it's Palmer Luckey himself, the founder of Oculus. As reported by RoadToVR:

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus who left the company in 2017, recently published an article with his thoughts on what it will take for VR to reach the mainstream. Price, he argues, matters little if the experience is not keeping people coming back to the technology on a regular basis.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the piece published on Luckey’s personal blog this week comes just after reported priority shuffling at his former company, Oculus. Last week saw the departure of co-founder Brendan Iribe amidst reports that a significant upgrade to the Rift headset was cancelled in favor of a lesser iteration focused on keeping costs down.

Luckey’s piece, titled ‘Free isn’t Cheap Enough‘, argues that the number of headsets sold doesn’t matter if customers aren’t staying engaged with the product and using it on a consistent basis. “Engagement is Everything,” he writes.

“You could give a Rift+PC to every single person in the developed world for free, and the vast majority would cease to use it in a matter of weeks or months,” Luckey writes to illustrate his point. “I know this from seeing the results of large scale real-world market testing, not just my own imagination [his emphasis] – hardcore gamers and technology enthusiasts are entranced by the VR of today, as am I, but stickiness drops off steeply outside of that core demographic. Free is still not cheap enough for most people, because cost is not what holds them back actively or passively.”

If VR were not just cool, but useful, people would be willing to spend what it cost to buy in. It isn't, though, so they aren't, and there's no price low enough to change that value-for-dollar calculation in VR's favour. So says Palmer Luckey himself, one of the current reigning patron saints of VR. “No existing or imminent VR hardware is good enough to go truly mainstream, even at a price of $0.00. [his emphasis],"  says Palmer Luckey, in what I can only describe as a "holy shit" moment for the entire VR industry. Of all the people to voice this criticism, Palmer Luckey is just about the last person who I expected might do so.

And yet, is anyone really surprised?

Facebook announced Oculus Quest, and it's already obsolete... according to its designers!

Remember when Facebook won (and lost) a lawsuit partly waged over the way they poached John Carmack away from Zenimax/ID? I wonder if they're re-thinking that acquisition after Carmack compared their next-generation "all-in-one" Oculus device to last-generation gaming consoles?

For the record, here is how Facebook/Oculus described their new device during the actual announcement, as reported by Gizmodo yesterday:

“This is it,” Mark Zuckerberg said to a crowd of developers and press at Facebook’s annual VR developers conference, Oculus Connect. “This is the all-in-one VR experience that we have been waiting for. It’s wireless, its got hand presence, 6 degrees of freedom, and it runs Rift-quality experiences.”

And here is how Oculus' CTO described the Quest at the same conference, as reported by arstechnica:

In a wide-ranging and occasionally rambling unscripted talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, CTO John Carmack suggested the Oculus Quest headset was "in the neighborhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3."

That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well.

"It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said.

So... it's wireless, but needs a four-camera room-scale setup to work, and it aims to provide a Rift-quality experience, but can't because it just doesn't pack enough processing power. Also, count on it, Quest will cost significantly more than the Go, if only because of those cameras... and Oculus Go isn't exactly flying off shelves. Why does this exist, again?

Another baby step for VR

VR still has a long, long way to go, but developments like this might help. From WCCFTech:

An industry consortium lead by Nvidia, Oculus, Valve, AMD, and Microsoft have today introduced the VirtualLink specification which is an open standard for next-generation VR headsets to connect to PCs and other similar devices with a single high bandwidth USB Type-C connector, forgoing the mess of cables that have traditionally plagued VR gaming.

The Connection is an alternate mode of USB-C should simplify and speed up the setup time for your VR gear avoiding one of the major inconveniences of having and using a VR headset in a room where it isn’t always connected. It should also make VR experiences much easier with smaller devices like laptops and notebooks.

[...]

This may also help in the long term with the need to provide higher display resolutions and high bandwidth cameras for tracking. VirtualLink connects with VR headsets to simultaneously deliver four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, which are scalable for future needs; a USB3.1 data channel for supporting high-resolution cameras and sensors; and up to 27 watts of power.

One of the nicer things about VirtualLink is that it has been purpose built for VR with optimizing latency and keying in on bandwidth demands to make the next generation of VR experiences a much better one.

Several of the major VR players are part of this initiative, though, which gives it a better chance to succeed than it would have otherwise, but it will be years before VirtualLink stars appearing on the market in actual VR devices, and years more before it can become the VR industry standard. Notably absent from the VirtualLink consortium, too, are Sony and Samsung, who currently have the two best-selling VR devices on the market in PSVR and GearVR, which could mean trouble for this newborn VR device standard.

Still... progress is progress, and this is a baby step in a direction that many analysts say VR needs to go. A lack of hardware standards isn't VR's biggest problem, obviously, but it is a problem, and VirtualLink could help bring some much-needed standardization to the VR industry.

Reminder: VR is still not useful. Also, tech journalism continues to be a bad joke.

Spotted today, on Tech Republic: "5 top use cases for AR/VR in business, and how you can get started."

Challenge accepted! Shall we keep score?

According to an Altimeter report by analyst Omar Akhtar, the combined market size for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is expected to grow exponentially from about $18 billion in 2018 to $215 billion in 2021. With this growing push toward immersive technology, many business are questioning how they can utilize it and how to being implementing it into their strategies.

Analysts have been making equally aggressive growth forecasts for VR for the past two years; as yet, this forecast growth has not materialized, and there is no sign that it's going to suddenly start happening anytime soon. I've noticed that Altimeter are now rolling AR and VR together into this number, which is probably wise considering that VR is not a thing, but there's no evidence yet of AR being ready for prime time, either. Not a good start. F.

Emily Olman, CEO of VR/AR at Hopscotch Interactive, said in the report that immersive technology implementation is a question of "when, not if."

"The sooner your company is able to understand the language [of AR/VR] and become fluent in what the possibilities are, the faster they are going to be able to react," Olman said in the report.

When people with a vested material interest in something keep predicting that it's just about to happen, for years on end, with no sign of it actually happening, you should be very suspicious. Someone whose job title includes "of VR/AR" definitely falls into this category, as do Altimeter themselves, whose actual business is "providing research and advisory on how to leverage disruptive technologies." I'd recommend that you take any of their recommendations with a healthy pinch of salt, if double handfuls of salt weren't actually needed here. F.

Here are the five use cases for immersive technology outlined in the report.

This is where things really start to go downhill.

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

By now, a headline like the one above, which I nicked from The Reg, should not be a surprise. The article that accompanied it, however, was much more optimistic:

Shipments of virtual reality kit have plunged, but growth is just around the corner.

So said analyst firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker, which found “shipments of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets were down 30.5 per cent year over year, totalling 1.2 million units in the first quarter of 2018.”

But IDC also predicts a rebound, for a couple of reasons.

One is that 2017 saw lots of headsets bundled with smartphones as the likes of Samsung and HTC sought to stoke the VR market. They’ve since stopped doing that, so this year’s scary shipment figures reflect the end of giveaways rather than a dip in real demand.

Another is that new products like the Oculus Go are both superior to their predecessors and nicely-priced, so their arrival in stores should spur demand.

A third is that the VR/AR ecosystem has matured and it’s therefore becoming easier to create content, which will see business adopt VR. IDC said it “believes the commercial market to be equally important and predicts it will grow from 24 per cent of VR headset shipments in 2018 to 44.6 per cent by 2022.”

How long, exactly, has a VR breakout been "right around the corner?" It seems like forever, but it can't have been more than two years.

Dispensing with that bit of ridiculous boosterism, though, we can move on to the rest of IDC's case here, which is even weaker.

Virtual meets reality

From Jon Evans TechCrunch:

“Despite many pronouncements that 2016 was the year of VR, a more apt word for virtual reality might be absence,” The Economist observed caustically last summer, noting that during that year forecasts of combined sales of VR hardware and software dropped from $5.1bn to $3.6bn to the harsh reality of $1.8bn. But hey, one rough holiday season does not an industry make, right? Surely in 2017 things began to —

— oh. "Shock Stat: In 2017, VR Headset Shipments For Most Top Brands Went DOWN Compared To 2016." So much for the many predictions that VR headset shipments would grow exponentially for years. Crow appears to be the appetizer for nearly every industry dinner these days. But that was before the Oculus Go, right? Except … the Go seems to have sold at most a quarter of a million units in its first few weeks, far behind the comparably priced Nintendo Switch released months earlier, and as I write this languishes well outside the top 20 of Amazon’s “Video Games > Accessories” bestsellers.

[...]

I dropped by the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara this week, and my main takeaway was that the industry has essentially abandoned the consumer AR/VR space, at least for now. Everyone’s aiming at AR/VR for work now. But how many jobs are there, really, where complex information needs to be accessed in a hands-free way? How many problems can be solved by VR conferencing but not videoconferencing? Sure, they exist, and the tech can be spectacularly great for them; but, again, for now at least, we’re talking Next Little Niche.

[...]

It’s the very early days of a new technology. It’s expensive. It’s still hardware-intensive. We’re still figuring out its best uses, and how it interacts with human physical location, and a whole new grammar of storytelling. But the Oculus Kickstarter launched almost six years ago, and I’ve seen a whole lot of VR/AR/mixed-reality demos since then, and every time, I walk away thinking: “This technology has so much potential.”

But in order to be the Next Big Thing at some point you have to actually start realizing your potential [...] the disheartening truth is that, despite the low-price new standalone hardware, despite all the effort that’s gone into software and design and storytelling, I still don’t feel like we’re meaningfully closer to that than we were two years ago.

Have I mentioned lately that articles like this are becoming increasingly common? Sure, people who are materially or emotionally invested in VR are still trying to sound bullish on its prospects, but those forecasts are looking increasingly ridiculous in the face of clear evidence that VR simply isn't happening, their foundations made of nothing but hype and hot air.

This week in VR...

... it's Facebook! Because of course it is.

From Business Insider:

As Facebook users around the world are coming to understand, some of their favorite technologies can be used against them. It's not just the scandal over psychological profiling firm Cambridge Analytica getting access to data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles. People's filter bubbles are filled with carefully tailored information — and misinformation — altering their behavior and thinking, and even their votes.

People, both individually and as a society at large, are wrestling to understand how their newsfeeds turned against them. They are coming to realize exactly how carefully controlled Facebook feeds are, with highly tailored ads. That set of problems, though, pales in comparison to those posed by the next technological revolution, which is already underway: virtual reality.

On one hand, virtual worlds hold almost limitless potential. [...] In these new worlds, every leaf, every stone on the virtual ground and every conversation is carefully constructed. In our research into the emerging definition of ethics in virtual reality, my colleagues and I interviewed the developers and early users of virtual reality to understand what risks are coming and how we can reduce them.

"VR is a very personal, intimate situation. When you wear a VR headset … you really believe it, it's really immersive," says one of the developers with whom we spoke. If someone harms you in VR, you're going to feel it, and if someone manipulates you into believing something, it's going to stick. 

As anyone who's read this blog knows, I'm definitely bearish on VR's prospects. I think it's essentially useless, that it's potential is far more limited than VR's proponents think, and that the current generation of VR headsets, including Facebook's, will not become a thing. Yes, if VR were to actually realize the potential that we keep getting told is has, then it could be a powerful tool for manipulating people... which would be troubling if combined with Facebook, which is built from the ground up to psychologically profile and manipulate people. It is Facebook that's the problematic part of that equation, though, and not VR per se.

Added to that, Facebook's shareholders are already unhappy about the billions being dumped into VR with no prospect of anything like profitability for a decade or more. I'm still predicting that Facebook will be writing down or spinning off their Oculus arm within two years, and given how much other trouble they're in, it might happen a lot sooner than that. VR is not, and will not be, a thing; you don't have to work about what Facebook will do with it. Or what anyone will do with it. Because nobody is going to do anything with it.

Which brings us to the other story in VR: HTC's new, better, and more expensive Vive. Yes, more expensive; apparently HTC are still betting their future on VR not only being a thing, but on that thing still having a high end for them to cater to.

"Drawerware"

With VR's two-year anniversary coming up quickly, I've been seeing a lot of videos and articles in the last week analyzing the current state of the industry, and questioning whether VR has, really, any future at all. This article from TechCrunch is a good example:

Compelling virtual reality shipped to developers and consumers nearly two years ago. The first flagship headsets arrived from Oculus and HTC back in the spring of 2016, offering enough resolution, frame rate, field of view, latency mitigation and position-tracking to produce believable visual immersion.

But no one seems to know what to do with it. To date, no killer app has extended the promise of VR from a novelty to a sticky experience or utility that reaches beyond enthusiasts to resonate with the consumer center of mass.

This isn’t to say that great experiences don’t exist. Apps like Tilt Brush, Elite: Dangerous and Google Earth VR have earned rave reviews and plaudits from enthusiasts. But we have yet to see a household phenomenon like Halo or Lotus 1-2-3 — applications that single-handedly propelled their respective platforms to wide use. At CES 2018, one industry analyst referred to VR as “drawerware,” referring to the likelihood of headsets to be stuffed in a drawer after a few forays into jejune worlds.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I was positively tickled by the "drawerware" terminology, credit for which goes to Wired: 

The launches of the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and mobile headsets like the Gear VR were heavily hyped, but these new computing devices have failed to develop momentum in the mainstream market. Even Sony, with its newer PSVR headset, has struggled to sell 2 million units to the 70 million owners of the compatible PS4 console in the last year. And in its effort to push its exclusive Gear VR goggles, Samsung gave away perhaps millions of units by bundling a shiny new headset with new Galaxy phones.

"I call it drawerware," says GlobalData analyst Avi Greengart about the Gear VR and other early VR headsets. "It gets put in the back of a drawer ... I have a Vive and PlayStation VR. The experiences are fascinating, but they are not very sticky. Right now, VR is really searching for a killer app.

If you feel like there's a common theme for these articles, you're entirely correct. It seems that an industry which was entirely convinced, just a year ago, that the single biggest obstacle to mass adoption of VR was its price point, are now realizing that dropping price points haven't really helped, and started moving in the direction of the real problem: the simple fact that VR really isn't useful.

Prognostication

December is coming... and with it, what is (traditionally) a slow time for news.

In a normal year, everything that will be announced this year has been announced by now; results for this quarter won't be known until January, so there are no meaningful numbers to analyze; and everyone in the news business is only weeks away from the annual crop of year-end top story roundup articles, which normally hit just before everyone goes on holiday for a couple of weeks.

As such, I wouldn't normally be expecting to have too many new developments to blog about for the rest of the year. Of course, 2017 hasn't been a normal year, and it's always possible that the fast-evolving gacha/loot box story will continue to have legs, but I'm guessing that now's a pretty safe time to make a few predictions before taking a bit of a break myself.

So... prediction time! At least regarding the topics that this blog has mostly been about for the last couple of years.

VR:

Let's start with a nice, quick one.

Having languished all year long, VR will continue to sell poorly this XMas season. Thanks to HTC's just-announced Vive Focus, the Microsoft-backed Mixed Reality headsets have managed to be obsolete before properly hitting the market, and the original Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR are all basically dinosaurs now...  and it's not like consumers were all that interested in them before. Sales of VR should continue at this same poor level, with no new major announcements or releases until the new year at the earliest. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] E3 has just happened, with nothing of note being announced for VR, in either hardware or software. Oculus Go's release has had no measurable effect, either.


Prediction: No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing.

Windows 10:

November and December are a high-volume time of year for most businesses, when disruptive system-wide OS rollouts are generally considered to be a bad idea; many companies don't even allow new system launches after the end of October (my employer deployed a new order-tracking and -fulfillment system on October 30th, and are coming to rather regret that decision). Basically, this means no new Windows 10 deployments for the rest of the calendar year, and this no Enterprise-driven shift away from Windows 7/Server 2008.

New deployments won't be happening at any brisk pace to start the new year, either, as companies come to realize that keeping pace with Microsoft's overly-aggressive update schedule is simply too difficult and too costly - the Windows-as-a-Service model has some serious problems that Microsoft badly need to solve. January is also not normally a big season for major system changes; many companies have synced their fiscal calendars to the taxation year, which means that the end of the year is also the end of their fiscal year, so January is normally spent on year-end book-keeping -- again, not normally a good time for a disruptive, company-wide new OS rollout.

Individual users won't be migrating to Windows 10 en masse, either. PC sales have been declining steadily for years, so I don't expect to see a wave of XMas PC purchases this year, and users with older PCs have made it very clear that they have no intention of switching unless and until they absolutely have to.

Add one and one and one, and you get no major shifts in the OS market until next February, at the earliest... which mean no big change in NetMarketShare et al's reported statistics until the first of March. Any changes that happen will be marginal, and Windows 10 won't overtake Windows 7 until next year, no matter how badly tech media bloggers want it to happen. The real test will be the period from next March to next November; if Windows 10 is going to take off, it will have to be then, when big companies with fresh budgets can do deployments with the least amount of disruption. If it doesn't happen then, it won't happen until closer to Windows 7's end-of-life in 2020.

Prediction: No big developments for at least three months here, either. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] Or, mostly right, anyway. Microsoft parted ways with the former head of their Windows and Devices division, and broke that division up across the company, which means that they've abandoned their Windows-focused strategy entirely. The fact that this was necessary says all that needs to be said about the strategy itself; even Microsoft finally gave up hoping that it would start producing results. That OS market is still not shifting significantly, with Microsoft themselves no longer expecting that to change, confirms my prediction.

Nintendo Switch:

There's no doubt that Nintendo's having their best year in a long time, but the Switch's first year hasn't been without its problems... chief among them, of course, being the production issues which prevented Nintendo from meeting any of their production milestones, as far as anyone can tell. In a recent presentation to shareholders, Nintendo's CEO answered questions about whether Nintendo would have enough units in stores for the upcoming XMas season by talking about the quarter after that... never a good sign.

I read that as Nintendo not having nearly enough units in stores to sell this season, which is a problem since the period from Black Friday to Boxing Day is when most retailers (in NA, anyway) post up to 50% of their year's sales (October to December can be up to 70% for some retailers). Failing to have enough units in stores at this time of year is a huge misstep, one which Nintendo will not recover from until well after the post-holiday hangover -- consumers normally don't spend much in January or February, with sales not picking up again until March.

Nintendo, of course, were bullishly predicting that they'd hit 15 million units sold by March, but there are a lot of assumptions that seem to underlie that prediction, including the pace of sales remaining more or less constant in spite of supply problems at a critical point in the year, and the traditional early-year sales slowdown. Nintendo are also assuming that every Nintendo household will be buying multiple Switches, something which seems like an unrealistic expectation.

Of course, the Nintendo Switch could become a full-blown craze, just like the original Wii did, but events like that are incredibly rare, and most companies only ever get one of them. The Wii became a craze because it appealed to people who'd never gamed before, in the same way that the PS2 became the best-selling console of all time by also being the cheapest DVD player on the market when it launched; there's no evidence yet that the Switch appeals to anyone except early adopters, longtime Nintendo fans, and core gamers who spend a lot of time travelling and who are willing to buy their favourite games a second time in order to have a version to take with them.

The Switch boasts only two games with real system-selling potential, and both of them are aimed at long-time Nintendo fans who were always going to buy the Switch, anyway; if you're not a long-time Zelda or Mario fan, the platform doesn't have much to offer except the opportunity to spend more than retail (because cartridges, for fuck's sake) buying games for a 2nd time that you either already own, or can buy more cheaply on Steam without incurring several hundred dollars of additional expense. And since Nintendo's gaming handhelds have declined in popularity every year since 2009, largely replaced by the smartphone for most users... well, suffice to say that I think a full-blown craze is unlikely.

The Switch will almost certainly outsell the WiiU, but that's a low bar to clear, frankly. If the Switch is still selling 2 million units a month after it passes the 20 million mark, I'll concede that it's remarkable launch has strong enough legs to keep running; until then, I will continue to regard Nintendo's plans to double production, and then double it again, to be just so much PR bullshit -- statements aimed more at their shareholders than anything else. The Switch is probably here to stay for a while, and will certainly avoid the ignominious fate that claimed the WiiU, but it won't be equalling, let alone surpassing, the PS4's market share anytime soon. And they won't be launching in China, either, no matter how badly analysts want it to happen.

Prediction: The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. [UPDATE: December 12th, 2017: WRONG!]

PlayStation & XBox (or, XBO-X):

Sony began 2017 with a commanding position in the console gaming market. Although Steam was still dominant on PC, and had more than twice as many installed users as PS4, Sony still had 53.4 million PS4 users worldwide, and was projecting 18 million more over the course of the year; they had the best-selling non-smartphone VR headset on the market; they had pushed their updated PS4 Pro console out a full year ahead of Microsoft's Scorpio; and they had successfully crushed Nintendo's WiiU, which had launched poorly, sold worse, and finally gone out of production. Sony were winning; all they had to do, to keep winning, was keep their collective foot on the gas.

And so, naturally, they decided to spend the year coasting, instead.

Sony coasted while Nintendo announced, and launched, the Nintendo Switch, a handheld/console hybrid that outsold all other consoles combined last month, at least in the U.S., in spite of persistent supply issues; apparently still stinging from the failure of PS Vita, Sony have no plans to contest the handheld gaming space with an updated machine of their own. Sony coasted while Microsoft announced one consumer-friendly initiative after another, from Play Anywhere to backwards compatibility to cross-play, something on which Sony are still dragging their feet; they kept coasting while Microsoft debuted the XBox One X, the "most powerful gaming console ever made," which can actually outpower and outperform the PS4 Pro -- thus giving Microsoft the hardware performance edge, for the first time this console generation.

With all this coasting, one might be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of Sony's PlayStation division had basically stopped caring... mainly because that was pretty much what had happened. Even though I'd never heard his name before this year, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Andrew House, the head of Sony's PlayStation department, was retiring; the whole of Sony's past year felt like the work of someone playing out the string until they could finally retire and spend the rest of their time bass fishing. Sony's gaming division lost a lot of momentum in 2017.

Whether they can regain that momentum in 2018 in anyone's guess. Sony's new PlayStation head, John Kodera, plans to take Sony's gaming efforts into the cloud, a strategy which aligns well with general trends in the videogame industry, while also being something that the Nintendo Switch's damn-it-all cartridges and tiny onboard storage seem poorly positioned to do. Whether they also decide to update the PS Vita with a new, cloud-powered version remains to be seen, but it's almost certain that the PS4 will get another hardware upgrade, the name of which will also be stupid. Sony is still the dominant player in console gaming, with the PlayStation 4 sitting at 64.9 million sold worldwide (compared to the XBox One's 31.25 million, and Nintendo Switch's 7.02 million), and will continue to occupy the #1 spot for a while, but they'll need to work harder to stay on top.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will continue trying to make XBox Live relevant to PC gamers who mostly game on Steam, while pushing 4K gaming to consumers who mostly doesn't own or want 4K televisions. The XBox One X (or XBO-X) will sell well, because it's new and in stock during the XMas shopping season, but it's really only appealing to people that already own 4K TVs and are also already invested in the XBL ecosystem, which may not be as many people as Microsoft thinks it is. With Play Anywhere equalling the end of actual exclusive XBox One games (anything released for XBox is also released for Windows by default), the only remaining move is for Microsoft to (a) ramp up in-house game development, to try to make the XBL/Microsoft Store look like a more inviting place to buy games, and (b) push the development of Mixed Reality gaming. The first will yield no results at all next year, since games take years to develop, and the second will yield no results at all, period, because VR (see above).

Predictions: Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. [UPDATE: December 8th, 2017: RIGHT!] PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. For their part, Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much.

Somewhat unexpected:

Wow. If you'd told at the start of this year that I'd end it having more to say about the Nintendo Switch than about Windows 10, I'd have said you were crazy, but here we are. I guess Nintendo's comeback console is just much more interesting than anything Microsoft is doing, these days.

Which goes to show the value of prognostications: more often than not, they're wrong. They're still fun, though, and worth writing down -- after all, a prediction that you can later deny having made is kind of cowardly. I'll still check in from time to time, and blog about anything that does catch my eye, including the normal OS market share check-ins on December 1st and January 1st, but that should be about it for the year. No best-of, worst-of, or top-story roundup lists here!

Unless of course, something of interest does happen. And with a year like the one we've been having, it honestly wouldn't fucking surprise me.

Oculus Go finally announced, may already be irrelevant

Back in July, rumours of Facebook's upcoming $200 standalone VR headset were garnering a lukewarm reception. Since then, of course, Intel have cancelled their own standalone VR headset due to a lack of interest, and both Oculus and HTC deeply discounted their tethered-to-PC headsets... with mixed results. Mark Zuckerberg teased yesterday's announcement with one of the most tone-deaf PR stunts to be seen all year, outside of the Trump administration.

Undeterred, though, Zuck went ahead with today's announcement anyway, confirming that Facebook's $200 standalone VR headset will be hitting the market soon, and that it will be called the Oculus Go. So, what exactly is Oculus Go? It turns out that nobody really knows.

TechCrunch attempted to explain:

Oculus was more than a little vague in how they portrayed the device, so I won’t assume too much, but there’s little doubt that the headset will be less powerful as a standalone than what the Rift can currently handle. That may end up disappointing die-hards, but subtle movements of the high-end market away from being tethered to a PC is going to do Facebook a lot of favors in terms of platform sustainability and leaving the early-adopter niche.

[...]

Oculus Go will save Facebook from having to build complex partnerships with smartphone manufacturers that are 100x easier for Google to gain through Android anyway. Samsung is Oculus’s only friend when it comes to mobile VR, and this year the company put both of its flagship smartphones on Google Daydream, as well. This move could likely signal a future where Oculus moves away from smartphone mobile VR as they shift to building their own platforms and letting Google dominate VR on Android, which was a bit of an inevitability anyway.

[...]

The thing is, there’s been this misconception that Valve or Samsung or Microsoft or Sony are Oculus’s competitors, when the fact is that their main competitor is irrelevancy.

TechCrunch buried the lede a bit in their piece, as far as I'm concerned, so I've reversed the sequence of these excerpts, to start with a description of what Oculus Go is, proceed to a description of what it will actually do, and end with what it, to me, The Point.

Still not ready for prime time

From BBC News:

It must have seemed like a good idea. As a taster for a big announcement about Oculus VR on Wednesday, send Mark Zuckerberg on a little virtual reality trip, including a stop in Puerto Rico.

But the reviews are in - and they are not good.

The sight of Mr Zuckerberg using VR to survey the devastation of an island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria may have been meant to convey Facebook's empathy with the victims.

The fact that he was there in the form of a cartoon seemed to many the perfect visual metaphor for the gulf in understanding between Silicon Valley and the real world. 

It looks like VR still isn't ready. Surprise!

Facebook, who own Oculus, are one of the industry leaders in VR hardware; with Facebook having a keen interest in making Social VR into a thing (even though it's not going to be a thing), one could be forgiven for assuming that this represents the cutting edge of Social VR:

Cutting edge, baby! Woo hoo!

Why Zuckerberg thought that virtually touring a disaster zone, using other people's suffering to showcase his social VR experiment, was a good idea, will forever remain a mystery. Why Zuckerberg thought that a social VR experience filled with painfully low-fi cartoon avatars would appeal to consumers, even without the disaster zone, is even more of a mystery. Seriously, why would anyone with even half a brain think that any part of this was a good idea?

Apart from Zuckerberg, natch, who clearly thought this was genius, and who still doesn't seem to understand how badly he's stepped in it.

"One of the most powerful features of VR is empathy. My goal here was to show how VR can raise awareness and help us see what's happening in different parts of the world. I also wanted to share the news of our partnership with the Red Cross to help with the recovery. Reading some of the comments, I realize this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry to anyone this offended."

You should be sorry to everybody, then, Zuck. Because even those of us who weren't offended by your attempted exploitation of Puerto Ricans (which is already most of us, BTW) can still be offended by the fact that you seem to think we're stupid enough to be impressed by your lame-ass VR bullshit. Empathy, my ass.

You see, Zuck, in reality, VR's most powerful feature is actually the sense of presence that it gives to people who are experiencing it directly. This is why VR evangelists keep saying that it's critical to convince people to try the tech. There are times when looking at a thing through the aperture of a 1080p screen really can't convey the true sense of the scale of what you're looking at; VR, however, can, providing the sense of scale that images on a screen lack.

But that only works for people who are strapped into their own VR headsets; it doesn't work if you stick a carton avatar in front of the thing, and then display it on the same 1080p screen that had already proved inadequate for conveying the scale of, say, a fucking disaster zone, to the viewer. Touring a disaster zone might convey a sense of the scale of the disaster to people who are taking the virtual tour themselves... but that's not something you can share with someone who isn't "there," unless you lend them your VR headet so that they can take the tour, too.

With one small publicity stunt, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to make social VR look profoundly heartless, aesthetically ugly, and fundamentally limited and isolating, all at once. VR experiences aren't easy to share with others... and, thanks to this, the attempt to share them now looks a lot less appealing in every conceivable way. Clippy had lower hurdles to leap over than this PR disaster has now put in front of social VR.

Which was never going to become a thing anyway, but still.

GG, Mark Zuckerberg! GG.

Another bad sign for VR?

One of the earliest high-profile VR games to see release was EVE: Valkyrie.

A dogfighting shooter set in CCP's EVE Online universe, it seemed to be generally regarded as a decent example of something that VR did well, while also being an excellent demonstration of VR's limitations. PC Powerplay described it as "easily one of the prettiest VR launch titles," and "arguably the best VR experience currently available for the [Oculus Rift] platform," in the same review where they described the same game as "a prime example of how we’re still at the very first generation of VR games - take away the VR headset, and there’s actually a remarkably shallow experience here."

Regardless of the game's excellence and/or limitations, though, there's no denying that it was one of the most highly-hyped early titles for VR, with CCP planning simultaneous Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR releases. Now, however, CCP have apparently decided that they'd like to make some money back from EVE: Valkyrie, which is why they're planning to release a non-VR version of the game on Steam. Because of course they are.

From Kotaku:

This week, CCP Games announced a massive shakeup to its immersive VR shooter EVE: Valkyrie. A free expansion coming in September called “Warzone” will, among other things, remove the need for a virtual reality headset. By decoupling Valkyrie from its VR roots, a much wider player base will be able to log in and play CCP’s unique and beautiful shooter.

[...]

In addition to removing the VR headset requirement, Warzone will add a new mode called “Extraction,” which will work as a sort of Capture-The-Flag-in-space, forcing players to navigate their way out of intricate complexes while trying to return the enemy’s “flag” to their base. Extraction is the fourth competitive game mode in Valkyrie, and the second to be added as part of a free content patch for all owners of the game.

I am surprised only that anybody is surprised.

Meanwhile, CBC News is reporting that VR developers are doubling down on long-form content, like virtual concerts, even while "VR at any length has struggled to go mainstream — weighed down by technology, cost, motion sickness fears and headset accessibility —  with some analysts even speculating its demise." The biggest technology problem that VR content makers will have to overcome may simply be the weight of the headsets, which make them too heavy to wear comfortably for extended periods, according to Occulus themselves:

While the tech will doubtless improve with time and further development, unless VR headset makers shrink the size and weight of the gear down to the point where wearing them is more like wearing ski goggles than welder's goggles, I don't see longer form content as being the solution to VR's issues. And there's still the simple fact that it's expensive; even Samsung's GearVR and Google's Daydream require thousand-dollar, high-end smartphones for VR to really work well, and if it's not working well, then what's the point?

With VR adoption stagnant, makers of VR gambling on content that their few users physically can't endure, and VR launch titles decamping for the larger user bases of Steam's non-VR marketplace... I have to say, I really don't see how this current generation of VR headsets can ever become a thing.

News of Oculus' coming $200 headset met with lukewarm reception.

To say that the Oculus Rift got off to something of a rocky start would be understating things. Once the darling of the tech sector for having single-handedly revived interest in VR, Palmer Luckey's overrated startup first promised a headset that would launch at a price of a couple hundred bucks, with the capacity to run on a budget laptop... only to launch at $599, with the requirement that you drive it with a $1500+ high-performance PC. Oculus then struggled to fill pre-orders for the headset, eventually telling customers to buy their Rifts at Best Buy instead.

The Oculus team have gone on to watch impotently from the sidelines ever since. They tried to force developers and consumers into a walled-garden Rift-exclusive ecosystem, only to find themselves excluded from the bulk of VR development instead. They've fought a protracted legal battle with Zenimax, earning a split decision on that front, while being outsold by HTC's Vive, Sony's PS4 VR, and Samsung's Gear VR (that last carries a touch of irony, since Samsung produced the Gear VR in partership with Oculus). They've cut $200 from the Rift's asking price, only to see sales remain flat, and their share of the VR market remain stubbornly small.

So, I wasn't at all surprised when Oculus went on to slash the price of the Rift by half during their "Summer of Rift" promotion, or when they announced that the new regular price would be only $100 more than that. They did manage to surprise with one move, however: announcing that they had a new, $200, entry-level standalone VR device in development, and were planning to go head-to-head with Samsung's Gear VR, now that they'd lost the high-end market to HTC & Valve's Vive.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to make of this new move. Yes, a truly standalone headset is something the VR industry needs to move towards, as are lower price points, but could Oculus actually deliver both of those things at once, having failed (so far) to deliver either? And, even if they can, will anyone care? I think my my feelings on this move could have best been described as deep ambivalence, and it would seem that I wasn't the only one to feel that way.

From Katharine Byrne at MCV:

Hot off the heels of Oculus' temporary price cut to its Rift headset last week, a report surfaced on Friday that the company might also be preparing an even cheaper model of the Rift as a kind of budget successor.

Currently code-named 'Pacific', the headset will allegedly bridge the gap between mobile-based virtual reality and higher-end headsets like the Rift. It will also be wireless, according to the report, and operate as a standalone device without the need for additional hardware, such as a PC or phone – much like HTC's new rumoured standalone headset.

Analysts, however, are undecided on whether it will turn Oculus' fortunes around, whose Rift headset has been struggling to match the shipping numbers of both the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR.

"Oculus is losing the high-end PC race to HTC Vive, but the company has seen the massive potential from Gear VR’s strong market lead," Stephanie Llamas, vice president of research and strategy at SuperData Research told MCV.

"Facebook is not a company for the niche consumer – their selling point is how accessible their services are to anyone, anywhere. So finding something with the potential for mass penetration is a priority, especially with Rift’s bumpy past.

"However, an untethered, self-contained device for $200 seems like either a loss-leader or a highly simplified VR experience (for instance, Google and HTC’s new Daydream device will boast the same conveniences for a much higher price). Pacific may be a combination of both so that Facebook can finally have a long-term stake in the mass consumer market, but it's too soon to tell."

Oculus have gone from being the darlings of VR, the crown princes of virtuality waiting only to be crowned, to the court fools of the industry. Almost every move they've made thus far has been the wrong one, including being bought by Facebook for over three billion US dollars in what could fairly be described as possibly the sloppiest, most rushed buyout of that size in US corporate history. Oculus desperately need to do something to revive their flagging fortunes, and they need to do it soon, before restive shareholders (and the corporate board members who represent their interests) lose patience entirely. But is this Hail Mary play really going to be the thing that saves them?

I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But Oculus have gone from being the leaders of the VR movement to being its also-rans, chasing already-announced products from other hardware makers rather than setting the next VR standards, and they don't seem to have any real idea what to do next, except to try doing what their competitors are succeeding with already. In a robust industry, there might be money to be made that way, if margins and price point can be kept low enough, but you don't get to be an industry leader by following, and the VR industry as a whole doesn't seem to have a lot of room for budget bit players. And the longer Oculus remain at the back of the pack, the harder it will be to make significant gains. 

Facebook's deep pockets notwithstanding, the team at Oculus are running out of time.

Oculus blinks, slashes Rift package's price to match PS4 VR.

From the International Business Times:

Oculus is temporarily cutting down the price of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to match cheaper rivals like the PlayStation VR. Oculus, the company acquired by Facebook Inc. in 2014 for US$3 billion, is taking steps to discover if the price has been the bottleneck for the device to become the bestseller in the bunch.

The Oculus Rift starting Monday is priced at US$399, including the Touch controllers. The price reduction will run for six weeks as Facebook targets to determine whether price had been the major roadblock why its immersive gaming and stories did not take off, Oculus vice president for content Jason Rubin said in a statement.

Selling a device at, or even below, cost has been a fairly standard practice for videogame console manufacturers for decades. The idea is that you take a loss on the hardware, and make your profit with licensing fees and the like on the back end, once your platform is established. Normally, though, a firm that's planning to pursue this strategy does so right out the gate; Facebook initially priced the Rift at US$600, though, a price that didn't even include the Touch controllers, which weren't even available when the headset launched.

At the time, Oculus seemed confident that the buzz surrounding VR as a whole would see the Rift selling like hotcakes even at that premium price, but the Rift is now well behind HTC's Vive in total sales, and even the two of them combined can't come close to matching Sony's PS VR sales numbers, which is why Oculus slashed US$200 off the price earlier this year. Agressively matching Sony's price is the obvious next move, but with Oculus' identity as a premium-priced product already well and truly established, and the general public showing very little interest even in Sony's budget-priced offering, I have serious doubts about whether this move will prompt consumers to suddenly start buying Rift sets in large numbers.

Look, if you've been eying the Oculus Rift with envy, and only waiting for the price to drop before buying, than go ahead and buy one. It's your money; you do you. VR does not currently enable any new experiences; it can only be used to buff a limited set of familiar experiences. Someone first needs to identify a VR activity that can only be achieved with VR, and that I'll actually want to do; on that glorious day, if and when it comes, I will start comparison shopping for VR headsets. But until then, even at US$399, and even with the Touch controllers included for that price, the Oculus Rift is simply not useful enough to be worth that kind of money.

VR started the year by posting terrible sales numbers across the board; I've seen nothing since then to suggest that VR sales have improved significantly. Against that backdrop, for distant fourth place Oculus to be slashing their price point by half looks more like desperation than strategy.

Oculus is closing its VR production unit

From The Reg, naturally:

Proving yet again that goggled nausea is a hard sell, Facebook's virtual reality arm Oculus on Thursday said it would shut down Story Studio, its VR production unit.

"We're now entering the next chapter of VR development, where new creators enter the market in anticipation of adoption and growth, and we've been looking at the best way to allocate our resources to create an impact on the ecosystem," said Jason Rubin, VP of content, in a blog post announcing the closure.

"After careful consideration, we've decided to shift our focus away from internal content creation to support more external production."

The next chapter in this woeful tale doesn't promise adoption and growth. The best it can do is to tease investors with the "anticipation" of a healthy market and to seed product demand with a $50 million commitment to help other companies develop "non-gaming, experiential VR content."

Yep... the whole VR thing looks like it's really taking off. 

This is when I'm supposed to say, "All sarcasm aside," but The Reg was really just getting going:

Not content to let Oculus explore the one proven consumer application for VR – high-end gaming – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains convinced that isolating people behind high-tech blindfolds can be an appealing social experience. [...] Never mind that there's nothing natural or social about the solitary confinement of an Oculus eye prison, the fact is that people aren't buying it. VR hardware and software sales have been underwhelming, with the possible exception of Sony's PlayStation VR.

Oculus' decision in March to drop the price of its Rift headset and Touch controller bundle from $798 to $598 is not the sort of thing a company does when its products are flying off the shelves.

In its unhappy ending, Story Studio couldn't even manage to be original. In January, Envelop VR, the Bellevue, Washington-based VR startup, shut down. In November, Vrideo, a would-be VR video hub, closed. And in February, Facebook shut down some 200 of its 500 Oculus VR pop-up kiosks in Best Buy stores.

Ouch.

It gets worse when the VR apologists try to spin the news. Take, for example, this bit of desperation from Android Headlines:

Sure, now that Story Studio is closing and any projects that were being worked on are being stopped immediately, it means that we’ll never get to see or experience those projects, which might be a bit of a letdown to anyone that was looking forward to seeing Wolves in The Wall, the forth film that was in development. As Oculus mentioned though, now they can use the extra funding to support third-party content creators who are also working on using VR as a narrative art form. This means that there is potential for some really great content coming from these other third-party creators and perhaps even more so now that they will have support from Oculus.

Yeah... because business that lack the resources of Oculus a.k.a. Facebook are going to be able and willing to lose money making VR content when Oculus a.k.a. Facebook can't even make a go of it. Riiiight.

They continue:

It’s also opening up Oculus to having more time to devote to figuring out other issues with virtual reality and augmented reality technology. As Oculus stated in their official announcement that went out yesterday, their attention can be focused on solving problems with AR and VR hardware and software. This is a good thing for the VR industry as a whole as there are still some issues with both the hardware and software which could do with some extra attention, and now Oculus is going to be able to provide that extra attention.

"Some" issues? Some issues??? Holy denial of reality, Batman!

This is not complicated: VR is not ready. In its present form, VR is extremely limited in its applications, barely adequate for doing even that limited range of activities, and not useful for anything that people will want or need to do, and that can't be adequately done without VR. And while some of VR's problems might be solvable with enough investment, that requires deep-pocketed companies like Facebook to be willing to lose boatloads of money every single year until those solutions materialize... both on the solutions themselves, and on building a library of VR content so that there's stuff to do with the tech once it's finally fit for prime time. 

The one thing, the only thing, that VR had going for it, was that companies like Facebook had deep enough pockets to be able to do that... if they could sell that business plan to their shareholders. Well, guess what? They can't. 

At least, Facebook clearly can't, because they're already looking to minimize losses while waiting for the tech to develop on its own, tossing only a token amount of money at the concept of content creation in order to be able to say that they're still spending on that. Make no mistake about it: this is a white flag, and it's the third such surrender (following the price cut, and the the closure of its Best Buy kiosks) just from Facebook.

VR is not a thing, and it's looking less and less like this generation of the tech has any chance of becoming a thing, anytime soon. Cheaper PCVR headsets will not fix that. VR arcades, which only serve to showcase the tech's limitations, will not fix that. And people who were looking to Facebook to be able to throw enough money at the problem to fix that, to basically will VR into being a thing... well, folks, I recommend that you stop waiting, because that ain't happening, either.

The market speaks: VR really isn't a thing.

Not yet, at least.

From Business Insider:

Facebook is closing around 200 of its 500 Oculus virtual reality demo stations at Best Buy locations across the US, Business Insider has learned.

The scaling back of Facebook's first big retail push for VR comes after workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups told BI that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. An internal memo seen by BI and sent to affected employees said the closings were because of "store performance."

[...]

Multiple "Oculus Ambassador" workers BI spoke with said that, at most, they would sell a few Oculus headsets per week at most during the holiday season, and that foot traffic to their pop-ups decreased drastically after Christmas.

"There'd be some days where I wouldn't give a demo at all because people didn't want to," said one worker at a Best Buy in Texas who asked to remain anonymous. Another worker from California said that Oculus software bugs would often render his demo headsets unusable.

"They didn't press on selling," the worker from Texas said of Oculus. "Their main thing was to have us do demonstrations and get people talking about Oculus."

Ouch.

There's a reason why the hype around VR has died down this year, after reaching such a feverish pitch in 2016. It's because consumers really aren't buying it. They're not buying the hype, and they're not buying VR headsets, either, and the nascent VR industry doesn't seem to know what to do about that. The only VR headset that sold at all well is Samsung's Gear VR, which did all of its sales alongside Google's Cardboard -- that was when consumer interest was at its peak, allowing Cardboard to move 5 million units, with Gear VR close behind.

But that was then, and this is now, and right now, consumers have basically zero interest in VR. Google shipped 5 million units of Cardboard during the height of last year's early VR hype cycle, but this year, Verizon is literally giving the much more polished Daydream away with every Pixel smartphone. The likes of Phandroid (who provided the chart at right) are still trying to hype 2017 as VR's year, but for reals this time, unlike 2016 which they said would be VR's year but which ultimately flopped, but it all feels more than a little desperate. You can practically smell the flop sweat.

VR has too many unsolved problems, too few worthwhile apps that make good use of the technology, and no sign that VR's pushers have any idea yet just what VR is really good for; the tech feels like it was rolled out to the marketplace while still being in beta, and the first impression that its made is hurting not only sales of VR, but interest in VR. When the second-highest-profile brand of VR headset can't even get people to try the thing in-store, I think it's fair to say that VR is in trouble. 

Consumers are voting with their feet and wallets, and it's hurting VR adoption across the board. HTC Vive isn't selling that much better then Oculus Rift, and even Sony's PSVR is struggling. VR isn't ready yet, and companies fighting for their share of the VR market may do better to work together on solving the platform's issues, so that they actually have a market to divvy up. Because right now, they really don't.