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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?
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.
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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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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