Facebook’s VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away::Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company’s best-selling Quest 2 VR headset. The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time. And, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is […]
VR was the future of entertainment when I was still in college, and I graduated in the previous millennium.
It’s hard to compare the old Virtuality arcade machines to Half-Life: Alyx though. Just a shame that few games are really following Alyx into the future. It’s expensive to make a proper VR game (or indeed any big game), and the fact that there’s not an enormous number of headsets out there is hardly encouraging devs to make more.
There’s other niches besides games. VR headsets would be pretty much the only way to watch 3D HFR movies at home, but nobody really seems interested in bringing them to the format. You can’t even get 3D 4K movies on Blu-ray. Plus wearing one for a three hour movie is likely to be tiresome.
Modern VR has modern enemies, and those are price, space, and comfort.
Um… you’re forgetting about content. Aside from Alyx, what else is out there?
Well indeed.
In terms of big full length walking around and shooting stuff VR exclusives, there’s pretty much just Alyx. Walking Dead Saints and Sinners is supposed to be decent. It’s in my library but I’ve never tried it.
Plenty of smaller games like Beat Saber are fun and easy for anyone to pick up and play. They’ve got that Wii-appeal.
Cockpit games like racing sims are an easy conversion. People have been raving about Gran Turismo VR.
Astro-bot was decent but outside a few gimmicks there was nothing particularly VR special about it.
It’s still in the enthusiast’s toy space right now. Not sure it will ever really get out of that phase at any price. It’s not something you go past in a shop and go wow, it’s something you have to try out, and in order to do that you’d already have to be vaguely interested in it.
I mean I pre-ordered a Vive day 1 and for the last few years its been sitting in a box. After Alyx I can’t think of a reason to pull it out again.
Blade & Sorcery, Into the Radius, Star Wars: Squadrons, Beat Saber, DCS World, Assetto Corsa (and several other racing sims), Battle Talent, Dragon Fist Kung Fu
These are all awesome VR games that my kid and I play frequently on the Index.