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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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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.
That sounds like a great number! Why wouldn't we rally behind this?
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.
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.
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."
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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