Is Half-Life: Alyx the killer app that VR has been waiting for?Spoiler Alert: No, it probably isn't. But it does look cool.

In what has to be the biggest hype/news to hit the VR scene for quite some time, Valve Software have finally released another full-blown game, for the first time in forever. But that's not even the big news -- the big news is that the game is a Half-Life game. And while it isn't Half-Life 3 (it's actually a prequel), Half-Life: Alyx is not only a new Half-Life game, it's a VR-only game.

Oh, and it looks pretty good, too.

The stakes couldn't be higher; TechRadar called Alyx, "a gambit where the very future of VR gaming is at stake." And while that might sound hyperbolic, it might not be wrong, with the announcement of Alyx prompting some VR evangelists to dub this the "killer app" that VR has long been lacking.

But, while some of the gameplay we're seeing will clearly need either Oculus Touch controllers, or the Knuckles controllers that ship with the Valve Index, I'm not convinced that the experience on offer here is different enough to convince skeptical consumers to suddenly jump onto the VR hype train; and I'm not convinced that the Half-Life IP, iconic as it is for the video game industry, is actually broadly popular enough to prompt non-gamers to buy VR headsets just to play it.

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 lowers Rift's minimum hardware requirement with software update

From ars technica:

When Oculus first announced the minimum PC specs for the Oculus Rift, the headset needed an Nvidia GTX 970 equivalent and an Intel i5-4590 to run acceptably. Now without changing the hardware, Oculus has used a new software API called "asynchronous spacewarp" to officially lower that recommended spec. Today, Oculus says the Rift will run acceptably on any machine with an Nvidia 960 or greater and an intel i3-6100 (or AMD FX4350) or greater.

[...]

The spacewarp system (which is built into the Oculus runtime) takes the two previous frames generated by software, analyzes the difference, and calculates a spatial transformation that can generate a "synthetic frame" based on the current head translation and movement. While Iribe was clear that this synthetic frame system is still "no replacement for native 90 hz rendering," it does fill in the frame rate gaps on systems that are not able to hit that framerate natively.

Hence, the Oculus Rift officially supports PC hardware that's less powerful than it did before. That includes a new $499 Oculus Ready PC from CyberPowerPC and AMD. Oculus is also certifying four Oculus-ready laptops from the likes of ASUS, Alienware, Lenovo, Aorus. Iribe promised that, within a few years, there will be hundreds of laptops that meet that Oculus Ready spec. For now, though, Iribe said "PC VR is more affordable than ever.

Lowering the barrier to entry by $1000 will bring Oculus into line with PSVR in terms of cost, with a potential larger user base since more people own PCs than PS4s, which makes it, at least, competitive. It still doesn't solve the problem of VR being essentially useless, and still not worth a $600 investment ($800 with Touch controllers), but at least it doesn't require a $2000 investment, which is progress. Now they just need to bring the cost of the headset down by half, and add a bunch of high quality, highly replayable VR content, and VR might have a fighting chance to become an actual thing, rather that being just another short-lived, barely-a-fad thing.

Next in VR: Oculus's overdue Touch controllers due to launch any day, will apparently be $200 to $250 USD

One of the biggest problems with VR is the fact that you simply can't do much of anything in VR which isn't already possible without the expensive VR headset. Only HTC Vive launched with a different control scheme; Oculus Rift literally included a standard XBox One gamepad when it launched, and PSVR also doesn't come with the PlayStation Move controllers included in the basic kit.

For VR fans, then, the debut of Oculus' new Touch controllers should be good news. But it isn't, because the new controllers are apparently priced not to move.

From Gizmodo:

Oculus Wants Us to Pay How Much for Its Overdue Touch Controllers?

Amazon UK, and other UK retailers, just leaked the possible price of the long delayed Oculus Touch controllers, and they’re expensive. The leak suggests that the Touch controllers will ship in the UK on November 23 and they’ll retail for ￡190. 

So we figure the price in the United States will be between $200 and $250. I guess it sounds about right. When added to the Rift’s already high $600 price tag, it firmly puts the system in the same price range as the technically superior $800 HTC Vive. Heck. It could actually end up being $50 more. Forgive us for feeling a little sticker shock.

And that’s over $300 more than all the equipment you need for VR on a Playstation (a Playstation VR headset, Move controllers, a PS4 camera).
And don’t forget, you need at least $800 worth of gaming PC to run the Rift. Figure in the price of a few games and getting started with the Oculus platform will run in the $2000 range.

For a nascent technology with no obvious utility, "sticker shock" are the last words that you want tech writers to be applying to your product, especially when they're the most enthusiastic audience for your sales pitch. The average consumer views VR with apathy, and that's just one of many hurdles between this generation of VR headsets and widespread adoption. Add in Palmer Luckey's lacklustre PR skills*, and a $2000 total price tag may well be a high enough price point sink Oculus' chances.

Quite the reversal from a year ago, when Oculus Rift was generating so much buzz that Facebook spent $2B for them, isn't it?