"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?

Oculus v. Zenimax decided

From polygon:

A Dallas, Texas jury today awarded half a billion dollars to ZeniMax after finding that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, and by extension Oculus, failed to comply with a non-disclosure agreement he signed.

In awarding ZeniMax $500 million, the jury also said that Oculus did not misappropriate trade secrets as contended by ZeniMax.

Of the $500 million, Oculus is paying out $200 million for breaking the NDA and $50 million for copyright infringement. Oculus and Luckey each have to pay $50 million for false designation. And Iribe has to pay $150 million for the same, final count.

Reached for comment shortly after the verdict, Oculus said they will be appealing, but that they look forward to eventually putting the case behind them.

Basically, Facebook and various Oculus execs were ordered to pay a total of $500 million in damages for poaching Carmack away from id/Zenimax, but were exonerated on ZeniMax's industrial espionage claims. Facebook, who have boatloads of  cash, intend to appeal the $500 million award, apparently confident that they can outlast ZeniMax in the litigation marathon and end up paying a hell of a lot less than $500 million. Look forward to an out-of-court settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing, and an undisclosed dollar value that clocks in well short of today's awarded damages.

With ZeniMax having failed to litigate their way into the developing tech sector, and Facebook holding the hammer going into the 10th end while being up 3 rocks, the overall effect on the VR industry should be basically nothing.

/drama

Unintended, yet predictable, consequences

Oculus' attempt to shut down Revive, ostensibly to prevent piracy, seems to be having exactly the result that one would expect:

A new software update for the Oculus Rift VR headset that was supposed to “curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make” has actually had the opposite effect. Whoops.

The creator of the Revive hack, which had allowed HTC Vive owners to play Oculus-exclusive programs before Rift’s latest update, has now released a workaround which restores functionality to his code.

Revive’s creator, Libre VR, tells Motherboard that “the original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls...the new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus’ ownership check altogether. By disabling the ownership check the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game.”

This is the thing about DRM: it may stop honest, paying customers from using the products they've paid for, in the ways that they feel are reasonable, but it does very little stop actual pirates, who can usually find away around it. Even when that's not really something they really even want to be doing:

Libre VR later added on Reddit that “This is my first success at bypassing the DRM, I really didn’t want to go down that path. I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies.” He also told Motherboard that “if he finds a workaround that doesn’t need to disable the ownership check, he’ll implement it.”

I'm reminded of the formerly paying Canadian Netflix customers, who are reportedly considering a return to piracy, now that Netflix won't deliver the same content to Canadian as to their American customers. Or the legion of Canadians pirating Game of Thrones, in large part because HBO won't make HBO Now available north of the 49th parallel.

Note that we're not talking about people wanting something for nothing, here. Canadian Game of Thrones fans are willing to pay for Game of Thrones; they're just not willing to pay for everything else on HBO Canada to get it. Canadian Netflix customers were paying for the service, only to find the service that was being delivered to them had been rather drastically curtailed.

Early adopters of Revive want to buy games from Oculus... they just want to be able to play them on any compatible hardware, something Oculus used to be OK with... until they discovered that Vive was going to actually give them a run for their money, at which point they suddenly weren't so OK with it.

So much for those principles, eh, Palmer Luckey? GG.

One less reason to get excited about VR

Here's a recipe for success:

1. First, make a really expensive toy with no obvious practical application.
2. Then, make consumers choose between your toy and your competitions' versions, when there aren't yet any games to speak of for either of your platforms.
3. Make sure you use DRM to lock that shit down.
4. In the process, make sure you break the promise you'd made to your customers that you wouldn't use DRM to lock that shit down.
5. Profit?!

Yes, Oculus is doing exactly that:

As recently as 5 months ago, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was promising his customers that they could play the software they bought from the Oculus store on "whatever they want," guaranteeing that the company wouldn't shut down apps that let customers move their purchased software to non-Oculus hardware.

But now, Oculus has changed its DRM to exclude Revive, a "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK [software development kit] and OpenVR," that let players buy software in the Oculus store and run it on competing hardware.

The company billed the update as an anti-piracy measure, but Revive's developer, who calls themself "Libre VR," points out that the DRM only prevents piracy using non-Oculus hardware, and allows for unlimited piracy by Oculus owners.

So... My apartment doesn't have a 5½ x 6½ foot space free in which to set up an HTC Vive, even if I'd wanted one; Oculus are well on their way to being exactly like the kind of anti-competitive outfit that people were afraid of, when it was first announced that Facebook had bought their souls; Sony's VR only works with a PS4, which I neither have nor want... What does that leave? And why would I want it? For that matter, why should I want any of them?

Add a heavy-handed DRM policy to a basically useless, over-hyped, and way too expensive product, and it's no sale, at least for me. GG, Oculus. GG.