FTC vs. ATVI+MSFT, in perspective

It appears that Lina Khan is serious about putting the brakes on tech industry mergers. Much to the surprise of many, many pundits and LawTubers, the FTC is suing to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard King (ABK).

The consensus of opinion seems to be coalescing around the idea that the FTC's case is weak. This consensus essentially takes Microsoft's position at face value:

1. that Microsoft Gaming is a much, much smaller player in the video games industry than either PlayStation (owned by Sony) or Nintendo;
2. that Microsoft have no presence in mobile gaming at all, unlike ABK, or any of ABK's major competitors in the mobile space, like Tencent or NetEase;
3. that Microsoft's control of ABK will have no competitive impact on the industry, since they're going to leave Call of Duty (CoD) available on competing platforms, including both Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Switch, for ten years.

If you assume that this argument is 100% true, then Sony appear to be freaked out over the deal for essentially no reason at all, and the FTC's objections to the deal appear to be entirely political. At best, the collective thinking goes, suing to block the deal is effectively a bargaining ploy: the entire process of resolving the suit could prolong the process of getting the deal done for months or years, and cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of additional dollars in penalties (per the deal) and legal fees. Faced with this prospect, Microsoft might be more amenable to the types of concessions the FTC might ask for.

I'm going to be the contrarian in the room, though, and point out that the FTC might be looking at a bigger picture than just this deal between Microsoft Gaming and ABK. Real talk here: taken as an independent entity, Microsoft Gaming, third-place purveyor of money-losing consoles and the games that people can play on them, probably don't have 68.7 billion US dollars to spend buying ABK or anyone else. This deal is only possible because Microsoft Gaming isn't an independent entity; it's only possible because Microsoft Gaming is merely the gaming division of a much, much larger entity.

Microsoft Gaming isn't buying ABK. Microsoft Corporation is buying ABK. And, viewed through that longer lens, the picture looks a lot different.

The Math Has Not Changed: XBox Game Pass is still not a good deal for the average consumer

It's been a good while now since I last posted about how, for the average consumer, Game Pass is simply not as cost-effective as just buying the games you're actually interested in. My conclusion, based entirely on the numbers, was that most consumers would be better-served by just buying what they want. 

Well, E3 has happened since then, and Microsoft and Bethesda showed off all the games that will be "coming day one" to game pass... eventually. Naturally, this has caused a lot of people to lose their minds. 

Paul Tassi's take, over at Forbes, is pretty typical:

It’s clear that Microsoft is slamming the accelerator on Game Pass, with or without a console attached to it, and they’re going to try to not just have a large roster of old games, but continue the idea that every new first party game debuts there, and now that includes all future Bethesda games too [...]

Sony, meanwhile, has taken the opposite path. This generation they’re not only sticking with selling individual new releases as they’ve always done, not rolling them up into any sort of subscription, but also increasing the price of their PS5 games from $60 to $70 [...]

It’s not ideal for each game you go to purchase [...] but once you really start digging into this math, the longer this goes on, and the more games are released for both systems, maintaining a roster of games on PS5 is going to be very, very expensive compared to Xbox.

Let’s say you want to play 12 Xbox Series X first party games over three years, and 12 first party PS5 games over three years. 

No normal consumer is going to want to do this. 

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.

Keanu Reeves wins E3 Everyone else was just.. meh

I know that we weren't expecting much from this year's E3, what with Sony not being there at all, and with EA doing several single-game announcements rather than a press conference, but even I was expecting more than this.

Cinelinx looks to be first off the blocks with their list of winners and losers, but the consensus of opinion seems to be that the only real winner was Keanu Reeves... and even he was only OK, with a stilted, obviously unrehearsed presentation that Reeves basically overcame through sheer charm. The double reveal that a) Reeves had actually done mo-cap and voice work for am NPC in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, and b) that he was not only appearing in the game, but at E3 to announce when the game would be coming out, was probably the most scene-stealing moment of Microsoft's conference.

The second most scene-stealing moment of E3 was probably Ikumi Nakamura's instantly meme-worthy appearance as she announced her game, Ghostwire Tokyo, during Bethesda's presser. Nakamura was sincerely enthusiastic, and charmingly goofy, and has become something of an overnight sensation on social media as a result; her game looks pretty decent, too.

We got confirmation that George R. R. Martin really has teamed up with the makers of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to make a video game; Elden Ring has a terribly generic name, and a meaningless, moody cinematic trailer that hints at an epic scope and dark tone (very much on-brand for both GRRM and From Software), but told us basically nothing about the game itself. Oh, and Forza is getting Lego content added to it, which actually looks surprisingly fun. 

And that... was basically it for genuinely memorable E3 moments, this year. Oh, sure, some stuff happened at E3. It's just that most of it wasn't all that memorable or noteworthy.

Oculus Quest, revisited

It probably didn't surprise you that I wasn't impressed with the Oculus Quest. I was listening to the Dad & Sons Podcast on the weekend, though, and they collectively came up with a counter-argument to my initial skepticism, which basically boiled down to a couple of points:

1. Facebook/Oculus are selling this as basically a VR game console, meaning that its US$400 price tag, with two VR controllers included, is in pretty much in line with their intended competition.
2. People who weren't interested in Oculus' Go or Rift products might just be interested in a US$400 VR gaming console, especially since it won't require them to pay for expensive PC upgrades anymore while still providing acceptable performance.

That got me thinking. The argument still felt wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I found myself mulling it over on the bus yesterday, though, and I think I've figured out exactly what my objections are.

As I see it, in order for FB/Oculus' latest product to succeed, it needs to clear all of the following hurdles.

Checking in with Nintendo Switch

In spite of Nintendo Switch's really good sales last year, I'm on record as being skeptical about the system's "legs." Sure, the system surged ahead in the holiday quarter of 2017, but they still didn't manage to out-sell the console sales leading PS4, and 2018 was off to a slow start. A lacklustre showing at E3 seemed unlikely to help, either, taking the wind out of the Switch's sales at a time when Nintendo should have been doubling down on their 2017 success.

Which is why I'm not particularly surprised to learn that the Switch's last-quarter sales are down compared to the same period of last year, as reported by GameSpot:

Nintendo has shared its financial earnings for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, and the Nintendo Switch continues to perform well. The company reports it has sold another 1.88 million Switch consoles worldwide during the period from April through June, bringing the system's total sales up to 19.6 million.

While that represents a slight decrease in Switch hardware sales from the same period last year (down 4.4% year-on-year), software sales grew by more than 120% year-on-year, with 17.96 million units sold during the quarter. Digital sales of packaged Switch games and DLC also grew by 68% from the same period last year.

This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

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.

Creativity is officially dead and so is VR

I must have gone to bathroom, or something, when this bit popped up during Sony's E3 event last week:

It's a very pretty video, with very pretty music, and it takes just over two minutes (2:10, to be precise) before actually fading into any gameplay from the game itself. And yes, it's Tetris. Like, literally, just Tetris but with Tron's aesthetics.

According to the game's Wikipedia entry, Tetris Effect has been in development for 6 years. It took them 6 years to add Tron's glowy graphic style to the now-34-years-young Tetris. Oh, and a pause button, or "an all-new Zone mechanic that allows players to stop time," as it's gushingly called by UploadVR.

Available soon on Windows, PS4, and PSVR, Tetris Effect should be all the proof you need that creativity is dead. They spent six years making a VR version of Tetris, in an environment where you can't turn around and spit without hitting a free version of Tetris, and thirty four years after Tetris was first released. In thirty-four years, nobody has succeeded in adding anything of worth or note to the gameplay of Tetris, and I don't expect that Tetris Effect will succeed where everyone else has failed.

The fact that this utter failure of creativity features prominently on UploadVR's list of E3's Biggest VR Announcements should tell you everything you need to know about the state of VR, right now.

E3's winners and losers

So, it's that time again... when everybody looks back, and tries to decide who "won" E3 2018. I thought Microsoft had the best press conference, but that Sony would probably be declared the winner by most commentators, but how do those predictions stack up to reality?

ScreenRant named XBox, Sony, Bethesda, and Ubisoft as their winners, while declaring Nintendo, Square Enix, and EA to be the letdowns of E3 2018. [Oh, shit, Ubisoft! I forgot all about Ubisoft!]

USGamer declared Microsoft to be the winner, and Square Enix to be the loser, with a few other "witty" additions:

• Losers: The crowd during Bethesda's Rage 2 Andrew W.K. performance; Walmart Canada; People who aren't emotionally invested in Super Smash Bros.; [their] health.
• Winners: Todd Howard; The people who have been yelling for a Metal Wolf Chaos release in the west their entire lives; Masahiro Sakurai basically saying fuck it and making Smash Bros. game people can't complain about; being hella gay.

[Dammit, why does everyone have to be a fucking comedian all the fucking time?]

Tom's Guide ranked their list:

1. XBox (grade: A)
2. PlayStation (grade: A-)
3. Bethesda (grade: B+)
4. Nintendo (grade: B)
5. Ubisoft (grade: B)
6. EA (grade: C)
7. Square Enix (grade: C-)

[Looks like someone's grading on a curve, but whatevs.]

It's early days yet, but so far, it looks like my take on things was pretty darn good. I do feel a bit bad for overlooking Ubisoft, though, so let's address that injustice.

Oh, yeah, and the other one: Sony's E3 presser

Well, if I'm going to cover them, I may as well cover them all.

Sony comes into this year's E3 as the clear industry leader. They may have spent last year more or less coasting, but the strong work they put it to build a stable of solid first-party studios has paid off in spades, and this years God of War continued the streak. Really, all they had to do was not fuck it up. So, did they manage to not fuck it up?

A joke that never gets old, by Alanah Pearce

Sony's E3 press conference did some... creative, shall we say? things with its format, which were more bewildering than impressive. Much like last year, actually, when Sony used creative lighting and a full symphony orchestra to propel the proceedings, which also left some scratching their heads. Breaking the momentum of their show while they moved people from one room to another was clearly not a good idea, though; and talented as he was, the banjo player was also clearly not as effective as last year's full symphony orchestra. Yes, it's good to see a company of Sony's size take some creative risks, but the poor logistics should have been obvious, here.

Once they finally stopped walking attendees from room to room, though, and started showing them actual games, things started to pick up.

No, Microsoft's original vision for the XBox One was not "right"

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

So goes the famous quote from Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English simply as George Santayana. He wasn't talking about Microsoft apologists, but OMFG, he may as well have been.

So, I was doing some simple YouTube searches, trying to gauge the reaction to the XBox E3 presser, when I came across this bit of revisionist history.

It's a lovely little think piece about how visionary Microsoft were the only ones preparing for a world of connected, online gaming; about how everyone saw it coming, but only Microsoft acted on that vision. They've suffered unjustly, is the clear implication here, for being such visionaries, and the gaming industry would be a better and healthier place if they'd just done a better job of selling their vision to consumers.

This is 100% bullshit. It quite simply isn't what happened. At all.

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.

Nintendo Switch scores 10 million sold

As any regular reader of this blog knows (yes, all two of you, ☺), I did not think that Nintendo would pull this off.

After a whole year of production and supply-chain problems, and with no clear or specific indications from Nintendo themselves that they'd actually solved those problems in time to capitalize on the busy holiday shopping season (their CEO recently responded to questions about this XMas' Switch supplies by talking up their plans for the 1st quarter of next year, for fuck's sake), and with them only sitting at 7 millions sold by the end of October, I really didn't think they'd sell another 3 million units by the end of December, a pace which was 3.42 times faster than the 875K per month that they'd averaged all year to that point.

And, guess what? They didn't do 3M more in sales by the end of December.

They did it by the end of November.

As reported by Erie News Now (who got the story from CNNMoney):

Nintendo just confirmed what we already knew: its hybrid gaming system is a hit.

The company said on Tuesday the Nintendo Switch -- one part mobile, one part home console -- has sold 10 million units since its March 2017 launch.

The announcement comes less than two months after Nintendo increased its fiscal-year projection, ending March 31, 2018, from 10 million to 14 million units sold. Nintendo expects operating profit for the year to hit $1.06 billion, up from its original projection of $572 million.[...] By contrast, the Wii U sold just over 13 million units since its 2012 launch, before it was discontinued earlier this year.

It would seem that there were plenty of Nintendo Switches available for sale on Black Friday, after all, and that basically all of them were indeed sold. Even if this recent number is slightly padded, and even if there aren't a lot of Switches left to sell for the rest of the month (something I wouldn't bet on, anymore, BTW), it's now entirely possible for Nintendo to exit 2017 on a solid pace to hit their end of March target, after all.

With their 2DS line, the NES Classic, and the SNES Classic also selling really well, there's just no doubt about it: Nintendo are having a hell of a year, and their big gamble on the Nintendo Switch really has paid off, in a way which should be sustainable long-term. The fact that they're now seeing some solid third-party exclusive releases for the Switch, like the recently-announced Bayonetta 3, cements the situation for them. No wonder Sony finally decided to take the Switch seriously, in the form of some serious price cuts to their PS4, PS4 Pro, and PSVR.

So, congratulations, Nintendo! You've pitched me a strike already, and we're not even close to the end of the year yet.

Prognostication Scorecard: 1-1-4

One right, one wrong, with 4 as yet To Be Determined.

Nintendo Switch 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. WRONG! (See above.)

PS4 & XBOX 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. RIGHT! Price cuts count as trying harder. Cloud-based PS4 offerings are still pretty fucking vague.
• 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. TBD. We might not know this one until the end of 2018.
• 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. TBD. XBOX seems to be selling well enough, but no numbers yet.

VR Prediction: 

• No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing. TBD. We might not know the outcome of this one until the end of March.

Windows 10 Prediction: 

• No big developments for at least three months here, either. TBD. NMS's recently revamped numbers look slightly better for Windows 10, but don't show a huge swing yet.

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.

Sony won't vie with Nintendo with a handheld gaming device

Considering how the PS Vita has failed to thrive, and how dominant the PS4 is in the console space, this probably isn't that much of a surprise, but it's still noteworthy that Sony is going to just let Nintendo enjoy a monopoly on the handheld gaming device market. Even more noteworthy is their rationale for doing so.

As reported by US Gamer:

According to a Bloomberg interview with Sony's Andrew House, the head of Sony's gaming division feels that the mobile phone market has essentially put a hold on mobile gaming. Talking about the last mobile gaming device Sony released, the PS Vita, House said, "The Vita experience was that outside of Japan and Asia, there was not a huge demand. The lifestyle shift toward the dominance of smartphones as the single key device that is always with you, was the determining factor."

Likewise, Sony is quick to point out that the Nintendo Switch, which has seen plenty of success since launching in March, is not a true mobile console. "The Nintendo device is a hybrid device and that's a different approach and strategy."

So will Sony abandon mobile for hybrids? Nope. According to the interview Sony's current strategy involves delivering more products for home consoles along with VR and non-gaming entertainment like original TV content and music.

[...]

However, analysts and developers still express hesitation for the Switch, questioning whether it has lasting potential like Pokemon Co. head Tsunekazu Ishiharu suggested earlier this year.

It's pretty much all the same points that I was making when the Switch was first launched. Outside of the diehard Nintendo faithful, smartphones have pretty much destroyed the demand for dedicated handheld gaming devices, and (again, outside of Nintendo's diehard fans) there's no proven demand for a hybrid console/handheld gaming device, either. The Switch is off to a decent start, and is certainly doing much better than the WiiU did at launch, but Nintendo haven't been able to put enough Switches on shelves yet to really test how much demand there is beyond Nintendo's most ardent supporters.

Nintendo's ardent supporters have spent years lining up to fail to buy Amiibos, NES Classics, SNES Classics, and Switches, thus proving to Nintendo that they'll suffer any indignity in pursuit of the latest Nintendo thing, but it needs to be emphasized that this is not normal consumer behaviour. The Switch may be the next Wii, with appeal that extends well beyond Nintendo's fan base into the broader consumer market, but then again, it might not be, and we don't have enough data yet to be able to say for sure, one way or the other.

For Sony to decide that they'll wait and see whether console/hybrid consoles are enough of a thing for it to be worth their while to make one, makes total sense to me. Nintendo's handheld and console sales have been declining since 2009; trying to recapture that lost ground with a single hybrid device is a huge gamble for them, a cure-or-kill approach which will either create an entirely new category of consumer device, or kill Nintendo's hardware business completely. I don't blame Sony at all for refusing to cover that action.

Microsoft wants Windows 10 PCs to become Amazon Echo competitors

Continuing Microsoft's quixotic quest to become everyone except Microsoft, while still somehow maintaining Microsoft's user base, it seems that their next target is Amazon Echo. And why not? when they're already trying to duplicate all of Amazon's other cloud-based services.

From The Verge:

Microsoft has been working on a new HomeHub feature for Windows 10 to better compete with devices like Amazon’s Echo. HomeHub is designed to create a family environment for a PC with shared access to calendars, apps, and even a new welcome screen. Microsoft is even planning to support smart home devices like Philips’ Hue lights, to enable Windows 10 to act as a hub to control and manage smart home hardware. While we’ve heard about HomeHub before, The Verge has obtained internal concepts of exactly how Microsoft is imagining HomeHub will work.

Microsoft is aiming to include the new welcome screen, shared desktops, and easy calling in the Windows 10 update due in September. This update should also include improvements to Cortana, and support for third-party smart home devices. [...] Microsoft is tentatively planning to support Hue, Nest, Insteon, Wink, and SmartThings devices with its connected home app. Cortana will be used to send commands to devices, just like Amazon’s Echo.[...] Any devices that come with these new Windows 10 features will rely on PC partners to create. 

And that's the problem, right there, with Microsoft trying to become all of its competitors, overnight: Amazon Echo is a total package, with the consumer electronics front end already built to go with Amazon's cloud-based back end, which itself ties into Amazon's existing distribution infrastructure, and network of retail partners. Microsoft has none of that, really; even the software that's supposed to drive all of this is a work in progress, and the hardware is actually vaporware that third party OEMs have to design, build, and market.

Microsoft is all over the place, right now, trying to leverage their PC OS market share into, simultaneously, Google's business, Apple's business, and Amazon's business, all while trying to sustain Microsoft's own business. Time will tell if that's sustainable, but I have my doubts: after all, Microsoft (Mkt. cap. $532.35B) is actually smaller than both Google ($658.89B) and Apple ($824.28B), and only slightly larger than Amazon ($462.60B), but seem to be pursuing a strategy that requires them to become bigger than all three of these competitors combined. I'm not going to say that it's impossible, but I don't see how it would work, and the attempt has them wildly all over the place.

Even saying that Windows 10 is the common thread doesn't help, since it really feels like they're trying to force their OS to be a one-size-fits-all solution to every technological problem. Microsoft is like the proverbial handyman with only one tool available, treating every problem like a nail. Why is Windows 10 a better fit for Amazon's Echo business than Amazon's existing cloud-based computing, inventory management, and product distribution tools? How is Microsoft planning to build the network of retail partnerships that help make Echo work, when they can't even build the hardware that's needed for that job? Or are they just building it and hoping OEMS, retailers, and consumers all come to their HomeHub of Dreams?

What's the plan, here? Is there a plan, here?

The Tech media, like a lot of mainstream media lately, seems to be obsessively focused on The Latest Thing, and not really looking at The Big Picture, but they really should start looking at the big picture. Microsoft might be able to turn Windows 10 into iOS for PCs, or they might be able to turn it into ChromeOS, or they might be able to turn it into Amazon Echo, but I seriously doubt that they can do all three of those at the same time, while also chasing Steam's and PlayStation's businesses in the gaming space, and maintaining their hold on business workstations and laptop. Surely something's got to give; it's just a question of what, and when.

The Nintendo Switch's fast start may not be fast enough

When it comes to Nintendo's Switch, everyone seems to agree that it's off to a good start, with Nintendo hyping its first month sales results at every opportunity. And there's no two ways about it, those numbers are pretty good:

In the 12-month period ended March 31, Nintendo earned ‎¥‎489 billion ($4.4 billion) in revenue, slightly down on the ‎¥‎504 billion it earned in the previous year. However, net profit increased from ‎¥‎17 billion in FY2016 to ‎¥‎103 billion ($925 million), beating Nintendo's own forecast by 14%.

The company said that the difference was down to better than expected shipments of the Switch, which sold 2.74 million units in March alone. That figure was attained by Reuters, which attended a press conference with Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima in Japan. Kimishima said that the company expects to sell a further 10 million units in the current financial year.

So far, so good. Where I start to have issues with the hype, though, is when Nintendo start trying to draw parallels between the Switch's launch and that of their previous console success, the Wii:

According to Reuters, Kimishima said he was "relieved" by the console's early performance. "If the 10 million target is achieved ... that means the sales momentum would be close to the Wii," he said.

There's a problem with that comparison, though: the Switch is not the Wii, and the market that it's launching into is not the same as one that the Wii launched into.

Nintendo's Wii was a pop-culture phenomenon. Launching in 2006, at the start of its console generation alongside Microsoft's XBox360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, and prior to PC gaming renaissance, which didn't really get going until 2010, the Wii didn't have to vie for market share with established competitors. Everyone was starting from zero; no platform was coming into the year with tens of millions of customers who already owned huge libraries of compatible games.

The Wii had a couple of other features that gave it a competitive edge. One was its price point; the Wii was cheaper than its competitors. Its control scheme was also unique, and intuitively easy to use; children too young to read, and whose hands couldn't really wrap themselves around the standard XBox or PS3 gamepad, could still grasp and wave around the Wii's baton, as could older players who might suffer from, say, arthritis.

The elegance and simplicity of that interface also made it easy for non-gamers to use. You didn't have to know from experience which buttons normally did things in games, or work through a lot of tutorials to learn how to control the games. The result was a platform that could connect players from three to ninety-three; children could play with their grand-parents, allowing multiple generations of families to all equally access and enjoy gaming, really for the very first time in the history of video games.

The result was lightning in a bottle; people who Microsoft and Sony hadn't bothered to design for and market to were suddenly interested in gaming, connecting to and with the Wii in a way that they simply couldn't for the XB360 or PS3. Nintendo really couldn't make enough of them to keep pace with that early demand; stores couldn't keep the Wii on shelves. The only similar example of a game console success was Sony's PlayStation 2, which flew off shelves, in part, because it was also the cheapest DVD player on the market, in addition to being a game console.

None of that is really true of the Nintendo Switch, though. Gamers who'd previously discovered gaming thanks to the Wii have now outgrown it, and are demanding more variety and sophistication in their games, along with better performance. The gimmicky control scheme of the Switch isn't really a selling point, either, with many Switch owners ditching their Joy-Cons for the Switch's Pro controller's better ergonomics. 

Unlike the Wii, where the quality of the unit was at least comparable to that of its competitors, the Switch looks and feels cheap, with a plastic screen that gets scratched by its own included dock, controllers that need extra insulating foam installed in order to work properly, and inadequate storage that make it essentially incompatible with the digital distribution that is taking over the industry... the issues just keep coming.

And while none of these might have been crippling if the Switch were launching onto a level playing field, the market that it's launching into isn't a level playing field. Thanks to Steam's 125 million users, PC (which wasn't a factor when the Wii was launched) is dominant in the current market, and Sony's PlayStation 4 isn't just outselling the XBox One, it's also still outselling the Nintendo Switch:

Sony Interactive Entertainment sold 20 million units of its PlayStation 4 console in the last fiscal year, boosting revenue by 6% and operating income by more than 50%.

[...] 

Across the entire year, 20 million units of the PS4 were shipped, 13% more than the 17.7 million units in the previous fiscal year. Given that the PS4 had 40 million confirmed sales in May 2016, that puts the total PS4 installed base somewhere around 60 million - possibly just below, but certainly not very far away.

[...] 

Looking ahead, Sony expects PS4 shipments to decline to 18 million next year. However, it expects the GNS division to improve in general, with a 14.6% increase in revenue and a 34% increase in operating income.

Remember, Nintendo are saying that they'll be thrilled to sell 10M units in 9 months, a pace of roughly a million units a month on average; Sony, on the other hand, are forecasting sales of 1.5 million units per month for the same period, and that's down slightly from the PS4's sales performance of the previous year. Sony are starting with a 60 million lead in player base, and will probably increase that lead even if Nintendo's Switch performs as well as Nintendo is hoping.

At this point, it's worth remembering that the WiiU had a player base of 13 million when it was discontinued, because developers couldn't be bothered to make games for its different OS and weird control scheme when it didn't have even half as many users as the XBox One... which itself still has only half as many users as the PS4. And the only game of note that the Switch has going for it right now is Zelda; yes, ports of Skyrim and Shovel Knight will probably sell reasonably well to Switch owners who have nothing else to play and a desire to justify their Switch purchases, but ports of games that most interested gamers already own on other platforms aren't going to sell Switches to the skeptical.

And when it comes to Nintendo's own new-game releases for the Switch... is the obligatory new Mario game going to be a better system seller than Breath of the Wild? Will anyone care about the new Mario game that doesn't already own the Switch? Are gamers really desperate enough for gimmicky tech demos like Arms to drop hundreds of dollars on a new console just to get them?

I know that Nintendo fans (and shareholders) have a lot of hopes pinned on the Switch changing Nintendo's fortunes in the highly competitive gaming market, but... how does that happen, exactly? Unless the Switch suddenly starts selling faster than the PS4, fast enough to regain some of the ground that Nintendo lost with the failure of the WiiU, I just don't think that the Switch can ever have anything like the momentum of the original Wii.

And, failing that, I don't see how the Switch does anything but follow the WiiU into irrelevance and eventual obscurity.

[Quotes from gamesindustry.biz.]

PlayStation VR doing better than expected, says Sony

There are times when Kotaku bore me, and there are times when they frustrate the hell out of me, but every so often, there are times when they get it exactly right, and their headline for this piece was right on sarcastic point:

PlayStation VR Is Doing Better Than Expected, Sony Says

The article that follows is filled with gems, too, like:

It’s not difficult to meet expectations when they’re set low, and Sony was clearly cautious when it came to making projections for the success of its new virtual reality technology.

Or:

While the device has sold better than Sony predicted, it’s unclear how much of that is because of higher than expected demand or simply because the company was never especially bullish on the new technology to begin with.

I find this interest, in part, because the crew at Kotaku were pretty bullish on VR's prospects for a long time, to a point that I once described them as "VR evangelists." Perhaps the VR honeymoon is over?

Reality, after all, is that which persists regardless of what you want to be true. Whatever spin Sony are choosing to put on their PSVR sales numbers, there's no way around the simple fact that they've sold 915K VR headsets to a market of 53M PS4 owners, which is an adoption rate of 1.7%

That's better than PC's VR adoption rate (HTC Vive and Oculus Rift together haven't sold 900K units yet), but it's still not good, and it's nowhere near enough to turn the PSVR ecosystem into something that third-party developers can make money making content for. If Sony are the only developer making PSVR content, then it's not ever going to have a large enough library to become a mainstream way to experience the PS4; it will remain peripheral.

What happened to VR?

Well, if you're reading my blog, then you probably already know what happened, but Business Insider has a pretty fair assessment of the state of VR play:

Over the past year, evidence has stacked up that VR isn't as hot as everyone thought it'd be, and it feels poised to go the way of the smartwatch, a once-promising new computing platform that ultimately flopped once introduced into the real world.

The evidence is tough to ignore.

Following the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, we have yet to see a breakthrough game or app. Plus, the cost is prohibitive for most people: The headsets start at $600, and go up from there if you want the motion controllers and other accessories. Plus you need a powerful computer to run the hardware, which will run you at least another $500.

Sony was supposed to be the savior of the high-end VR headset. Its new PlayStation VR is designed to work with the tens of millions of PlayStation 4 consoles already out in the wild, giving it an immediate advantage over the competition. But, like with Vive and Oculus Rift, there wasn't much enthusiasm around the games and content for the PlayStation VR.

Google appears to be stumbling too. It slashed the price of its new Daydream View headset this week to $49 following a report from Amir Efrati of The Information that Google is "disappointed" with early usage numbers for the device.

Meanwhile, overall sales of VR headsets are very low, and PlayStation VR appears to have performed well worse than expected, according to data compiled by market research firm SuperData.

Given VR's lack of a value proposition, I was expecting to see that sales of these expensive white elephants had suffered, but I had no idea that sales for VR hardware were this terrible. So far, only Gear VR has actually topped the million mark in sales; PSVR managed only 28.85% of its sales forecast from only a few months earlier; the Rift and the Vive don't have a million users between them; and Google is selling Daydream at fire sale prices, apparently oblivious to the fact that a $50 add-on to an $900 Pixel smartphone still puts its VR offering well above the price point of either Oculus' or HTC's offerings.... for a smartphone-based VR experience.

This is beyond simply "not pretty." This is disastrous. And there's no sign of it improving significantly anytime soon. It's a good thing that Mark Zuckerberg is OK with spending another $3 billion on VR R&D before seeing a dollar in profits, because they're not going to be making a profit on Oculus anytime in the foreseeable future. Neither are HTC, Valve, Sony, or Google. Or anyone else that's pinned their hopes (and futures) to the VR hype train.

BI's article ends with the blunt assertion that VR "is going to remain a niche product at best." Honestly, given how badly VR is performing so far, and how many hurdles it faces, I think that's an overly optimistic assessment. So far, VR isn't even a large enough niche to turn a profit, given how expensive it is to develop for the platform.

Well... It won't be for lack of trying...

I've said before that VR isn't going to "change everything" in gaming. It's not that the new VR head sets aren't impressive, it's just there are just too many problems that they haven't solved yet.

Por ejemplo... how will users traverse virtual spaces? HTC Vive limits you a 5½ x 6½ foot space, so you'd better not make a game that involves running or jumping; Oculus just sits you down, and puts an XBox controller in your hands, which means that you can't anything in VR that you can't already do in a normal game.

Other interactions with VR aren't much better - the Vive's controllers are better than a gamepad, but still pretty crude compared to, you know, hands, which means that manipulating virtual objects is still a pretty clumsy affair. Also, there's a lack of tactile feedback, simulation sickness that hasn't actually gone anywhere, and the simple fact that there's just nothing so far that VR is actually good for, and that anybody wants to do, or is physically capable of doing with several pounds of VR helmet on their heads for hours on end.

As a niche product for the flight sim crowd... well, they tend to build actual full-scale cockpits for a level of verisimilitude that not only looks right, but also feels right, so it's anyone's guess whether VR will actually be good enough for a serious simmer, but so far driving and space dogfighting sims are the only ones worth playing. Oh, and Space Pirate Trainer, a guns-akimbo VR update of basically Duck Hunt.

Did I mention the price yet? Only Sony is talking about putting out a VR system that approaches affordability, and even that's going to be close to $800, when you include the VR gear and the PS4 that you'll need to plug it into. With either Vive or Oculus, the display and a new PC to drive it will run you close to $2000, all to play seated driving and flight sims, and/or basically duck hunt. Oculus have had trouble making enough headsets to meet demand, but that's mainly because they aren't exactly scaled up for mass-market levels of manufacture.

Once they solve the traversal problem, and the interface problem, and the simulation sickness problem, and figure out tactile feedback, and reduce the weight of the display to something close to what Google Glass weighed, and make it wireless, and then figure out something to do with all that tech... sure, at that point, VR can change everything. But we're still a long way away from that point. I just don't see this current generation of VR being anything that the average consumer will want to spend money on.

That said... companies like Facebook, Sony, and VALVe certainly aren't letting these virtual realities deter them.