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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?
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
I think it's reasonable to consider a technology as "failed" if everybody building it gets out of that market due to lack of consumer interest. Like you, I have a 3DTV and do occasionally use that feature. But if all of the TV manufacturers have decided that it costs them more to include that small amount of extra hardware than they make back from consumers such as us, then I'll agree that it's a failed idea.