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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?
Can we just stipulate that revenue is perhaps not indicative of excellence?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
...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."
The best smartphone based VR experiences at best result in result in a "neat..." response while PC based room scale + motion controls makes it possible to truly trick your brain into feeling like your in a completely different world.
Smartphone VR is the 3D TV of VR. It simply doesn't offer a significantly better experience than it's 2D counter part. I don't see this changing until we get massively more powerful smartphones and full positional tracking.