I had missed this change when it happened, and I suspect that a lot of other people were also unaware that the methodology had changed. This isn't the first time that Valve have made changes to the VR section of the Survey, though; the VR Survey results are the only ones which are presented with the detailed breakdown first, and only then states the overall value, "Steam users with VR Headsets."
I will give HTC this much credit -- they've lasted longer than I thought they would. But considering that consumers are not showing any appetite for Metaverse, or for blockchain products in general, outside of a small group of well-heeled early adopters, I don't see why anyone would want HTC's blockchain-based Metaverse knockoff.
I mean, seriously.... Viverse? So much for dignity, I guess.
As the COVID-19 pandemic's first wave gathered speed, and fortunate souls like me switched from meatspace commuting to tele-commuting, I started seeing more and more takes like this one, from CNBC:
The alert among you will have already spotted the repeating pattern here: a click-bait headline that talks about a VR boom as if it's happening,
then immediately follows with a sentence that only says that it could
happen; and "analysts" with skin in the VR game, bullishly predicting that VR will grow into a multi-billion dollar business in the next five years, in a report published a year earlier, before the pandemic had even started. In short, a lot of speculation with no substance, breathlessly presented as if CNBC were reporting on something that was already happening.
We've been seeing this same pattern play out for years, in no small part because analysts like PwC have been making these same predictions for about five years now, without the predicted VR boom ever happening, but COVID-19 changed a lot of things. Did it change this one? Was this actually VR's hour, come round at last?
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:
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.
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.
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.
I first encountered the term "spatial computing" in a Reddit thread on the topic of VR. My post touched on a theme which should be familiar to anyone who's read any of the other posts on this blog about the subejc: that VR is only good for qualitatively enhancing a limited subset of existing experiences, without enabling anything quantitatively new. In other words, it lacked a strong use case, and would never see widespread consumer adoption until that changed. To quote Palmer Luckey, "No existing or imminent VR hardware is good enough to go truly mainstream, even at a price of $0.00."
One VR defender fired right back, though, declaring my statement to be "simply not true," before going on to list of a bunch of qualitative enhancements to existing experiences like telepresence, social media, and spatial computing, which is defined as "human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces." In VR, specifically, that equates to the use of physical actions in place of other input schemes, i.e. motion controls, which also didn't require VR, and which have stubbornly not replaced other input methods because motions controls suck.
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.
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:
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.
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!
The percentage of VR headset owners increased by 0.05% of Steam's total user base, with only HTC Vive and Oculus Rift showing growth that registered as more than 0.00% on the Steam Hardware Survey. Multiplied by Steam's 125 million users, that's about 62,500 headsets sold... in November, which is one of the two busiest sales months of the year.
Even Black Friday couldn't shift VR's market momentum.
The 0.78% of Steam's total users who have VR or AR headsets, by the by, similarly approximate to 975K total headsets, worldwide, since VR's launch two years ago, and to get even that high, you have to include Oculus Rift's two developer kits, which are almost certainly not in the hands of average consumers. Which must mean that the "eight million headsets" cited by The VR Soldier includes non-SteamVR users, also, like PlayStationVR, GearVR, and, presumably, Google Cardboard.
That's not enough to support any platform, and VR is a platform; headset sales need to pick up sharply, and soon, if this round of either VR or AR hardware is going to be anything other than a footnote in tech history.
Lest we forget, Valve Software isn't only working on separating their
primary business, the Steam storefront, from Microsoft's Windows OS.
They're also devoting significant resources to VR technology, an R&D
spent which apparently includes Valve-branded VR hardware, likely
iterating on HTC's Vive designs, and supporting software, including a
sequel prequel to Half-Life 2.
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:
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.
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:
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?
But CinemaBlend is a self-described entertainment news and celebrity gossip site, and TechCrunch covers start-ups and technology exclusively. Neither one has the cachet of an a major print publication like, say, Forbes. So it's noteworthy CinemaBlend and TechCrunch have now been joined in calling out the VR Emperor's New Clothes by none other than Forbes, under the headline, "Virtual Reality: Steep Decline Is More Than A Hiccup."
Predictably, Forbes then go on to list price (too high), clunkiness (they're uncomfortable to wear, and can "make the user feel foolish when wearing one"), and comfort and security (lack of environmental awareness, simulation sickness). Forbes, like so many others, have continued to miss the elephant in the room: the simple fact that VR still doesn't enable any activity that can't also be done without the tech, and that people will want to do.
Remember back in June, when IDC were predicting that VR headset sales were just about to rebound after plunging by thirty-five percent? Well, here's the thing about that... funny story... it's not happening. At all.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
