As I have written many, many times in past blog posts, I find it baffling and curious how religiously some people have defended virtual reality and the VR headsets, no matter how much of a relative commercial failure they have been. One of the aspects of this quasi-religious attitude is to counter cold hard facts and numbers with feelings and emotions.
What baffles me is that still, to this say, the attitude has not changed for many people.
In a recent YouTube video made by someone discussing the new Nvidia RTX cards, and whether they will ever become successful or flop, I wrote a comment making a comparison to the PC VR headsets: I wrote that the RTX might suffer the same fate as VR headsets because of the similarities. The VR headsets were a commercial failure because of their exorbitant launch price. Nobody is going to purchase a piece of hardware costing over $700 for such a niche use, especially since the library of triple-A titles is abysmal. This might become the fate of the RTX cards (as they, too, are really expensive at launch, and offer no value for that money.)
I got a like and a comment from the video's author, telling that the comparison is quite good.
Somebody else responded to my comment asking how VR has been a commercial failure.
I proceeded to respond with the facts (which I have recounted so many times in this blog): While things like game consoles typically reach the 1 million units sold mark within weeks of being published, and typically the 10-million mark in about one year, the PC VR headsets sold less than a half million units in the first few months (the vast majority of them being preorders), after which the sales crawled to an almost complete halt. After about a year the adoption rates were quite abysmal (according to Steam's own statistics, about 0.4% of users had any sort of VR headset. At this moment that number stands at about 0.7%.) Also, the library of triple-A games for the system is abysmal, a direct consequence of the abysmal adoption rates, and something that just goes to perpetuate the problem.
I kid you not, but I literally almost laughed out loud when a couple of people responded to that comment of mine with the most stereotypical religious blabbering you can think of. Things like "clearly you haven't tried VR. It looks fantastic!" and proceeds to describe some random game, and how it looks so good on VR, and how it's so much better than in a normal display, and so on.
Mind you, in no comment of mine did I write anything at all about anything even remotely related to the quality of VR, or what it is to play VR games, or the experience, or anything of the sort. The only thing I wrote about was related to the commercial success of the headsets, their launch prices, and their adoption rates. I made absolutely no comment about playing with VR headsets, or what it is like.
Yet, still, more than one person responded to me exactly as if I had said that "VR sucks!" The most archetypal response of the type "if you just try it, all your doubts will vanish!" There was a complete disconnect between those comments and mine.
I saw this kind of quasi-religious blabbering over two years ago, and incredibly I'm still encountering it today, even after all this time. Incredible.
(For the record, I have a PSVR. It hasn't made those numbers and facts somehow vanish. Curious, isn't it? Apparently the PSVR failed to convert me into the VR religion.)
What baffles me is that still, to this say, the attitude has not changed for many people.
In a recent YouTube video made by someone discussing the new Nvidia RTX cards, and whether they will ever become successful or flop, I wrote a comment making a comparison to the PC VR headsets: I wrote that the RTX might suffer the same fate as VR headsets because of the similarities. The VR headsets were a commercial failure because of their exorbitant launch price. Nobody is going to purchase a piece of hardware costing over $700 for such a niche use, especially since the library of triple-A titles is abysmal. This might become the fate of the RTX cards (as they, too, are really expensive at launch, and offer no value for that money.)
I got a like and a comment from the video's author, telling that the comparison is quite good.
Somebody else responded to my comment asking how VR has been a commercial failure.
I proceeded to respond with the facts (which I have recounted so many times in this blog): While things like game consoles typically reach the 1 million units sold mark within weeks of being published, and typically the 10-million mark in about one year, the PC VR headsets sold less than a half million units in the first few months (the vast majority of them being preorders), after which the sales crawled to an almost complete halt. After about a year the adoption rates were quite abysmal (according to Steam's own statistics, about 0.4% of users had any sort of VR headset. At this moment that number stands at about 0.7%.) Also, the library of triple-A games for the system is abysmal, a direct consequence of the abysmal adoption rates, and something that just goes to perpetuate the problem.
I kid you not, but I literally almost laughed out loud when a couple of people responded to that comment of mine with the most stereotypical religious blabbering you can think of. Things like "clearly you haven't tried VR. It looks fantastic!" and proceeds to describe some random game, and how it looks so good on VR, and how it's so much better than in a normal display, and so on.
Mind you, in no comment of mine did I write anything at all about anything even remotely related to the quality of VR, or what it is to play VR games, or the experience, or anything of the sort. The only thing I wrote about was related to the commercial success of the headsets, their launch prices, and their adoption rates. I made absolutely no comment about playing with VR headsets, or what it is like.
Yet, still, more than one person responded to me exactly as if I had said that "VR sucks!" The most archetypal response of the type "if you just try it, all your doubts will vanish!" There was a complete disconnect between those comments and mine.
I saw this kind of quasi-religious blabbering over two years ago, and incredibly I'm still encountering it today, even after all this time. Incredible.
(For the record, I have a PSVR. It hasn't made those numbers and facts somehow vanish. Curious, isn't it? Apparently the PSVR failed to convert me into the VR religion.)
That almost sounds like they didn't read the comment at all before replying to it, or saw a keyword and then skipped it and said some irrelevant stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me about that I once watched a person play a game. He got stuck to a code entering sequence (he eventually skipped it through level select if I recall). I then said to him in a comment that "the code to access further is figured out in such and such a way" and he said "man this is a buggy-ass game that crashes all the time it sucks man". As I've played the same game for years now I said "what" to myself and asked him to clarify as the only crashes I've ever encountered were with extensive cheat usage, never at normal gameplay. You can probably guess already that he said nothing to that. Didn't even reply.