How to sell a new technology that’s no longer new.
If you want to buy a VR headset, you have plenty to choose from. So many, in fact, that the choices can be daunting. Do you want something portable or something tethered? Something inexpensive or the best you can get?
The big question, and the one the market still hasn’t answered, is how many people want a VR headset at all. The technology is here and rapidly maturing; hardware is becoming less expensive and more capable at a good pace.
But even that presents an issue, because the perception among people I speak with often seems to be that, if there is always something a little bit better and a little bit cheaper on the horizon, why jump in now? Every platform has as many drawbacks as it has features, and no one seems to know what a feature-complete VR platform would even include, or when it will get here. That situation may be making potential buyers skittish.
The perfect VR system might be something that is:
– Portable
– Inexpensive
– Ultra-high resolution
– Offering full room-scale tracking for the headset
– Including reliable motion controls that work in full 3D space
– Able to be taken on and off pretty much instantly, without messing up hair or makeup
Needless to say, that system doesn’t exist yet, and it sure as hell won’t be announced at E3. But the mainstream has been fed a very specific idea of what virtual reality is and should be from years of pop culture, and anything that doesn’t deliver on those traits is probably going to be seen as a letdown. People walk out of movies like Ready Player One interested in VR, but the only platforms available to them don’t even have a working solution for walking around a virtual world.
THE SOFTWARE QUESTION
On the other hand, the hardware that exists today is selling, although very few companies want to talk about specific numbers. The challenge right now is releasing games that keep people in the headsets for extended periods of time, games that go up against the best of what you’re playing on traditional displays.
“The first round of software had a very specific purpose, and that was to, quote unquote, fill a store,” Oculus’ Jason Rubin told Polygon. “In other words, if you walk into a clothing store and there’s one pair of jeans, that’s not a clothing store, and that’s probably not a store you’re going to want to return to. So we wanted to have a diversity of offerings so people could come see some of the things VR could offer. And I would say, in a lot of cases, that first generation [of games] were demos. They were short, they were unique … but the community writ large would look at them and say, ‘This is neat, where is this going?’”
He was speaking in context of Stormland — a recently-announced big-budget title from Insomniac Games that hopes to offer a deeper, longer-term gaming experience than most VR titles — but crafting lengthier, more engrossing experiences has been a problem with the VR industry for a while now.
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Source: Polygon