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Valve's Gabe Newell Says Only 30 SteamVR Apps Have Made $250,000+ (roadtovr.com)
New submitter rentarno writes: According to Valve President, Gabe Newell, only 30 virtual-reality apps on Steam (of some 1,000) have made more than $250,000. But that isn't stopping the company from throwing the bulk of their weight behind virtual reality; Valve recently confirmed that it's working on 3 full VR games. Valve still believes in a huge future for VR, even while things are slow to start. It'll take work to find and make the content that's great for VR, Newell says. "We got Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress running in VR. It was kind of a novelty, purely a development milestone. There was absolutely nothing compelling about them. Nobody's going to buy a VR system so they can watch movies. You have to aspire and be optimistic that the unique characteristics of VR will cause you to discover a bunch of stuff that isn't possible on any of the existing platforms." How do you view the VR industry in early 2017? Do you think it shows promise or will eventually fail like 3D TV?
HL3 VR Confirmed
Can we just stipulate that revenue is perhaps not indicative of excellence?
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It's pretty simple really: When the systems themselves reach a certain affordability threshold, sales of the games will increase dramatically. I don't know what that price threshold is, but I imagine it's much much lower than the Vive's current price.
Why are u using old input/controller technology for your games?
The current generation of VR headsets is bulky, the resolution is mediocre, the cables are annoying, and the profusion of platforms and controllers makes it painful to set up and use.
The next gen is going to be higher resolution and wireless, and Microsoft is going to have standard APIs for them. I expect that's when they'll go mainstream.
WebVR also isn't ready for prime time yet, but once it is, you'll probably see a lot more VR porn sites popping up, which should also help adoption.
I think VR sex is the only thing that will save VR from the dustbin. Maybe VR porn could pull enough money in to keep development going....VR sex chat bots....
There are a few games that are *awesome* in VR. The obvious ones are cockpit games - flight sims and the like. The others are less obvious.
I love space pirate trainer. It has to have been pretty easy to make. In 2d it'd suck.
I just hope that there are enough users to support the effort needed.
To make it compelling they're going to have to make entirely different kinds of games, not 2D retreads.
This post ends with the comment-bait line "How do you view the VR industry in early 2017? Do you think it shows promise or will eventually fail like 3D TV?" My 3D TV works fine. My wife and I watched X-Men Apocalypse on it just last weekend. No problems. Am I supposed to think it's a failure because it didn't become ubiquitous? Or is it a failure because the TV manufacturers couldn't keep pitching it as the get-in-now-or-get-left-behind future to drive a sale? That's not what technicians call failure. That's what marketers call failure. If you're asking if VR is going to make everybody who touches it buy and sell tons of software until we are all using it all day long and VR is the main thing we do....well, no, that's not going to happen. If you're planning on that happening, you'd best steel yourself for the big "failure" now. Let's stop this stupid measurement of success. Let's call success something that works. Not something that makes everyone spend money forever...that's what we call a pipe dream.
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That sounds like a great number! Why wouldn't we rally behind this?
The manager of the federal lotteries board announced that only a few people win more than 250k per lottery.
How can anyone compare VR with the failure of 3D TV? 3D TV failed because who wants to wear cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others? 3D TV is expensive, and causes headaches and eye-strain for some people. There wasn't any killer content to push people to 3D TV that was overwhelmingly good enough to overcome the disadvantages; a lot of 3D content was perfectly watchable in 2D. 3D TV was just an expensive novelty.
But with VR... well admittedly it has the cumbersome glasses that prevent you from being social with others, and is expensive, and causes eye-strain and nausea, and has no killer app. But can you say that it's just a novelty? .... Hmmm. OK, maybe they are the same after all.
... they have a failure on their hands. Can't they just go back to making games? Gambling, skins, VR.... What happened to Valve? Are they too rich for their own good these days?
AR will take off someday as it's useful in pretty much all situations. VR is much less useful, isolating. Requires an unreasonable amount of dedicated space. It seems like it will remain a niche except outside a few vertical markets like 3d design and architecture. I'm sure there will be a market but it seems unlikely to be a mainstream tech.
I'd.be happy to be wrong
Considering how brief and low-budget many of these apps are, it's not too surprising that only ~3% have made more than a quarter-million bucks. Many of the apps aren't even games, but 'experiences' that are either non-interactive, or are sandboxes with no rules/win condition. A VR game that lasts 5 hours is considered 'long' still, with ports of 2d games being nearly the only ones that are significantly longer. Recall that many early 2d games on the Atari or NES would only last an hour or so for a playthrough, if not for their difficulty.
AAA video games have been stuck in a rut for the past 12 or so years, I think due to the standardization of controllers. New controller features/more buttons drove much of the development of more sophisticated games. I recall first seeing a PSX controller and thinking "that's too many buttons! two on each shoulder?!" but now suspect that a few more might give the industry a shot in the arm; look at how overloaded the buttons are in e.g. the Dark Souls games, and how often a context-sensitive button gets the context wrong. The PS2 added analog face buttons but they were then removed a generation or two later since no games figured out how to use them in a compelling fashion, although the analog triggers remained (thanks, Dreamcast!). Recall what new ideas came out of early mobile games from touchscreen/gyroscope controls, e.g. Angry Birds and Zenbound.
VR makes gameplay that depends on depth perception a possibility; the 3ds was supposed to do this but it was too unstable (at first) and low-resolution to give accurate depth cues. Interacting with depth is made easier with the new generation of motion controllers, that are finally accurate enough to make it feel like your hands are in the game.
Most critics cite the high price of VR but it's been gradually coming down. You can get a Google Cardboard viewer for nearly free from multiple sources, and if you don't have a smartphone you can get a used old-model Galaxy S from ebay cheap, and combine it with a Gear VR. If you have a ps4 there's the $500 (all included) PS VR. Even the high-end PC-connected VR is getting cheaper; a year ago you'd need a ~$320 Geforce 970 graphics card plus a $600 Oculus Rift (assuming your PC is somewhat recent), but now a $170 Radeon RX 470 will suffice, and the Rift and Vive were $100 off (more or less) around Christmas. Rumor is the Vive's price will drop $100 or so later this year due to cheaper base stations/tracking chips. Windows Holographic headsets are coming out this year for $300, which connect to Windows PCs of course. In addition, multiple companies are working on all-in-one solutions, some of which will likely hit market this year, expected to be around $500.
Disclaimer: I've never actually tried VR, but am excited about it and follow the scene closely.
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...until I tried it.
I have no idea when exactly VR is going to happen--obviously, a >$500 PC + an 800 headset is too big a price point to see mass adoption--but I have no doubt it is going to happen. There's really never been anything like it. I got a Vive some months ago and every person I've shown it to has come out of it looking like they're coming down from a mushroom trip.
However, the challenges to making the experience as compelling as we naturally feel it should be are numerous. Not only does a developer need engineers and art and immersive sound etc., like any interactive medium, but designing for total experience is just something there isn't even a vocabulary for yet. A film director has total control over the frame; a screen-game designer still has quite a bit. Not so in VR; people look wherever they want to. And then how to design for people of all sorts of different physiologies, heights, abilities, etc. etc. and make the experience compelling for each of them? It's a monumental task, and anyone saying otherwise just really hasn't thought about it.
It's my feeling that all this talk about VR "making it" or not is really just a news cycle digesting itself. Last year some people figured out they could make headlines if they talked out of their asses about billions-of-billions-of-dollars in instant revenue. A lot of people outside the industry thought this was pretty exciting. Then it didn't happen. Now the adults (Newell, as well as HTC's CEO Chou, Zuckerberg, etc.) are stepping in and saying, "uhh, we don't know why you were listening to those guys in the first place."
There were some developers who said they were going to develop exclusively for VR. That's an exceptionally bad idea when there are multiple headsets out already and a few more still coming or in development.
The odd thing is that these were smaller companies without the resources to spare. Larger developers could afford to experiment without hurting their bottom line.
Back in my day (C64, Atari 800, TRS80) thems good numbers.
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I view the VR industry from the 1980's with a great deal of disdain and scepticism. I'm surprised it's still dragging itself along like a legless zombie in 2017.
All Valve has to do to absolutely dominate the market is to reproduce VHS vs. Betamax world domination procedure. For those youngsters who were never exposed to videotape, the VHS format was technically inferior to Betamax. But Sony tightly controlled what could be released on Betamax - refusing to allow allow "art film" producers to use it, and the competing format - VHS, championed by Matsushita/JVC - was "open." Consequently, Betamax died a slow death. It was kept on life support by broadcast TV companies.
Suck it up. VR is gonna rock once it goes to 4K. The future is bright for VR.
What has Microsoft done with VR? Hololens is not VR.
The beauty of any AR systems is that they can also be VR, they simply block out the entirety of the outside world, or otherwise re-skin it (a better approach so you don't bump into real objects).
Now it's true that the Hololens cannot block out your whole FOV presently, but that's why they have extended out the timeline for delivering a consumer product. As it is the 360 videos they offer still work pretty well, even in the smallish field of view they cover today...
Currently as primitive as it is Microsoft has the best platform for the future of any VR use that is public. I'm sure there's better stuff the public does not know about yet...
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How can anyone compare VR with the failure of 3D TV?
3D TV "failed" (though I see there are still 3D showings of any big movie to this day) because it's not really 3D at all. Just because you can tell some things are closer is nothing like 3D. It's maybe 2.5D at best - you can't lean over to look at something behind something in front, for example...
The reason why VR (really the AR/VR spectrum) will succeed is that it's fully 3D. You can look around something You can look under something. You can move around something.
What will be truly amazing to experience is when someone gets around to recording a fully 3D video (where perspective can be changed within some limited space). That will make the 360 video of today look like cave paintings.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I always believe VR will change the whole world. I have a VR device myself but I don't use it a lot for playing games. Watching VR videos is my favorite.
3DTV has one fundamental flaw: It doesn't add to the experience. You're still watching a movie. Basically, to translate it to VR, that would mean that you're still playing Civilization or Tabletop Simulator, but watch the game float in front of you instead of looking at it on a screen. If that was all VR is, yes, it would be doomed to fail. Because for that experience, the overhead is WAY too high. Setting up the whole equipment, in a room that's more or less dedicated to playing, wearing a VR helmet, all that just to get an experience that may be fun the first 3 times but loses its gimmicky charm soon, that won't fly.
VR is much, much more, though. Yes, there are games that are essentially banking on being gimmicky versions of normal games, but there are also experiences you cannot sensibly duplicate on old school gaming hardware. There is that lightsaber game, or a game where you climb up houses, games where being able to experience 360 degrees is vital to the whole game and so on.
New technologies in gaming have often been used wrongly. Why? Because all that was tried was to cram the same games into the new technology. Often with subpar results. Whether it was different input devices or some gimmicky toys (powerglove, anyone?), what most of them did, and what still a lot of VR game developers do, was to try to cram the old formula into the new technology. That can only fail. Because the formula has already been optimized to fit the technology that exists. You will not create the better RTS game in VR. At least not if you offer the same interface that is optimized for keyboard/mouse/screen gaming. If you can add the VR component, then we're talking. How about a "god-game" where your believers actually react to where you stand, towering over them? Or a strategic game where you actually ARE the general and your troops actually react to you being "there" with them?
VR games will, at least in my expectation, be less defined about how you play something different but way more about immersion than games were so far. To expand on the "general" example from above, contemporary games already allow you to play Napoleon, sit on your hill and send dispatch riders to your troops. VR will allow you to really experience this, with full 3D audio and the fully immersive experience of "being there". The quality of the experience would be a vastly different one. And this can actually be true for any kind of game, from sports to RTS to jumpscares, whatever your preferred genre, the experience will be vastly more immersive.
What will make or break VR, though, is whether we find new genres that only make sense on VR. Like I said earlier, there are a few experiences you cannot sensibly duplicate without VR. That would be basically all experiences where a full body simulation enhances the experience or even makes it possible in the first place altogether. The lightsaber game from earlier would be a good example. There isn't really a sensible way you can implement something like this with mouse/keyboard input or controller input. It just won't get the same feel to it.
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From the friggin' summary: "Valve President, Gabe Newell [...] throwing the bulk of their weight [...]"
Sorry, couldn't resist...
AC
Oh, no, that's only $7.5m!
God what a flop for software-only sales!
How on Earth do you manage to spin an article/summary/headline like that?
Especially when I cannot name ONE AAA VR title yet.
First off, anyone who has tried a Vive gets blown away. Even the stupid demo applications are hella impressive. When you play something like Project CARS or DCS, it's very difficult to communicate how real the depth is, and how immersive the full room simulation and tracking makes the experience.
Second, it's not just gamers and technical people. My wife, who never has expressed any interest in any video game ever, is bugging me to get the wireless adapter so she can play Holopoint more. Which she routinely plays until she can't move, and Holopoint is a pretty basic game. I pay attention when there are technologies she looks to use; I imagine others do as well.
Third, the average price of most Vive games on the Steam store is under $5. This is impressive, given that there are probably only 500k Vive units out there.
AR requires you to wear stupid headsets in public. Outside of specialty professional engagements, until you get AR on a contact lens, this is never, ever, ever going to go into the mass market. AR and 3D TV are much closer in terms of the market problems. The gateway to AR is going to be your smartphone.
VR requires a stupid headset but literally puts you in your own world.
VR, and the Vive specifically, is one of the few technologies that has left me awestuck. The first time that happened was when I figured out how to use my 300 baud modem. The second time was when I got my hands on an internet connected VMS VAX. This was the third.
Interesting times. If you're a doubter try a Vive on a well equipped PC.
..don't panic
DiRT Rally on PlayStation VR is absolutely amazing. Once you go there there's no going back to regular "flat" driving again. This is very far from 3D movies where I don't really care if I watch them in 2D or not. The actual ability for the driver to judge distance vs speed in VR is completely different (and incredibly realistic) compared to regular flat gaming, even in 3D rendered worlds.
VR is a fad - like 3D movies. Too much faffing around for mainstream appeal.
The problem with VR is twofold:
1) The cost of the hardware required to run it is still pretty steep. This is something you really can't just skimp on if you want decent frame rates. Expect to build a system worthy of the " gaming rig " title if you want a decent experience.
2) Due to the first problem, there aren't as many folks buying VR titles. As a result, the developers are hesitant to pour money and resources into the creation of the titles as they will have a difficult time recouping the costs. This really becomes a problem with multiplayer titles as you will quickly note the lack of players to compete against.
I own an HTC Vive unit paired with a higher end gaming rig and while it does the job as advertised, it isn't without some minor issues.
Resolution is one of them and is the first thing you'll notice if you're used to looking at the ultra-crisp flat panel displays we're used to. You will get used to it, but it is an issue. The GPU hardware just isn't there to drive dual 4k displays at 90 frames per second. It'll get there, but we're not there yet.
The unit isn't glasses friendly. You can wear them, but they need to be a narrow frame to fit within the headset. I have a specific pair I wear when using the unit.
The unit can be a bit heavy for some folks and uncomfortable after a time. Those who are prone to motion sickness had best leave this tech alone. The wiring tends to get in the way and I find myself unwrapping from the wiring from time to time.
You need a wide open space to play in. I can't tell you how many times I've whacked the door, ceiling fan or other items in my play room flailing about in VR space. It does an OUTSTANDING job of making you forget you're actually standing in a small room but you'll remind yourself in a hurry when you whack the wall. ( Keeping the boundary warnings on does help )
Overall though, the VR play experience just puts everything else to shame. To the point where I'm looking forward to good VR titles far more than I am a non-VR game. I think the best path going forward for developers would be to develop for both platforms allowing the use of VR hardware if available. The typical first person perspective titles would be great candidates for this. Eg: Skyrim, Fallout4, any of the First Person Shooters out there, etc.
Some of the titles I particularly enjoy:
QuiVR ( pre-release, dedicated developer patches / updates nearly daily. Outstanding title. )
Eagle Flight ( UBISoft's foray into VR. I have more hours played in this than any other title and what I bought the Vive for. Unique flying sim )
Space Pirate Trainer
AudioShield
Thumper
Serious Sam VR ( still in development )
TheBlu ( good for demo use for your family / friends. Lots of " Oh Wow " moments, no motion sickness )
Im surprised there are that many to break 250k. I own a rift setup and check the stores daily. Steam is full of shovelware and demos. Even oculus home is mostly experimental indie games. There just aren't many games worth buying, especially on steam! The ones that are worth buying, everyone gets.
Pretty much all of these posts can be summed up in, "Have you tried it?"
People that have, will argue that it doesn't matter, these are rich games and a new space, it will take time, but literally everyone can have my money if they keep making awesome content.
Then the rest of you will be too cheap / poor / an a$$hole and say this is proof it will die.
Find a friend that isn't a jerk and has a good job. Give a game a try.
I never want to go back to console games. They just don't make the cut. They are for nostalgia only.
Once I can find full-time employment with standard benefits then I will be able to justify spending $1K-$2K on a headset and PC upgrade to run it. In the mean time, I might pick up a PSVR if I can ever find a demo station to try on the headset first. By far the biggest problem with VR is trying to find out whether or not the headset will fit your head, not to mention how it will work for people with vision issues that can't wear contacts.
The simple fact is, VR is disorienting because of low frame rates. Don't give me that bullshit about how the human eye can only perceive 24 FPS or whatever. That applies to watching flat 2D screens from a distance done by studies with outdated methodology. Analog systems are not so easily quantified and anything other than pure analog input can have issues. VR is very "close" to the eyes and surrounding. We need faster frame rates... much, much faster. The technology isn't there yet.
Comparing successful games to the number of not-as-successful games is a bad metric. There's lots of shovelware VR titles just like there is any other open platform. There's also a lot of low-cost games that aren't trying to make AAA money.
the peripheral is too expensive - I would have bought an oculus or comparable VR headset if they were affordable, they are at least 3 to 4 times what I would pay for them.