2) Only windows. Agreed. But I'm glad they did so they could get one platform dialed in instead of chasing multiple rabbits. For now.
3) Games - copying part of this - do yourself a favor and try with Elite Dangerous or Assetto Corsa. And gaming doesn't scratch the service in terms of application - training, social interaction, SEX, therapy, etc, etc.
As for 3: I played Elite for a bit. And then quit when I got motion-sick. I'm not particularly motion-sensitive, but DK2 got me there pretty quickly.
Maybe the retail one is better in ways that wouldn't make me sick in that case, but from what Valve people have been saying, the only reliable way to get rid of the sickness is to remove the disconnect between not-moving and seeming-to-move, aka make games that involve only your real-world motion.
If that's the case, it implies that what we need are radically different games than what we have. So I'd either want to see those games, or see some proof that you can do Elite-style gaming with no motion sickness even when playing for hours.
I feel pretty confident in saying that the people who spend big bucks on computer gaming are mostly not giving two shits about Linux while they do it. SteamOS and general Linux gaming is pretty decent these days but still... if you are a hardcore gamer, odds are overwhelming that you are running Windows.
Or not. Give it a year and it won't matter. Today's top-of-the-line tech is tomorrows middle-of-the-road. And if you saturate the market in the first year, who will you sell to then?
There are a lot more tech geeks on Windows than you think. Get out of your bubble sometime and you might see that there are probably more of us than there are of you.
The games aren't there? The games aren't where? Where is this "there" you're talking about? I keep hearing people talk about this "there", but I've been playing games in VR for over a year now and been enjoying the heck out of myself. I think you mean to say "the games are here already, and only going to get better".
You're not going to get the standard AAA experience level graphics in VR, you're talking about a ~20ms difference in render time, with twice the amount of view to render (In polygon processing at least) But good VR is very sensitive to hardware performance.
This is not a requirement. It's a nice-to-have. 60fps is good enough for most people. 75fps is good enough for the vast majority of people. And asynchronous timewarp largely makes the issue moot, too.
Regardless, Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion dollars. Zynga has a market cap of $2.4 billion. I think the era of AAA games like Call of Duty being your main cash-cow are over.
You don't need to spend anywhere near all of your cycles to make a good VR experience.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/does-porn-still-ha...
I also recall reading a different article (can't find it now and don't want to do too much Google searching at work for it) about how almost all the most trafficked porn sites are owned by a single entity now. From what I remember of the article, it posited that their technology has fallen behind and they have little incentive to keep pushing tech forward given the razor thin margins they have on operating the sites.
1. Hardware requirements are steep (GTX 970 minimum), so plenty of hardware -- including plenty of hardware that's good for high-end gaming today -- won't be good enough for this.
2. Only Windows support. No compatibility with Linux, SteamOS, or even OSX means that the techie enthusiasts who'd play with it as a tech toy are going to be less interested.
3. But biggest of all: The games aren't there. It's become very clear, both from playing with the DK2, and listening to presentations by Valve and Oculus people, that VR games can't just be regular games with VR bolted on. "Skyrim, but with VR" sounds cool, and makes for a cool five-minute demo, but will just make you sick and be unsatisfying in the long term.
VR games need to be designed for VR in a really fundamental way. It's not clear that there are any interesting games that do this, or that there's a lot of effort going toward making games like this.
If this were a product that were coming out from Nintendo, I'd be confident that they had a good idea about how to adapt their franchises to take advantage of VR in a really cool way, and that there'd be at least a handful of games that made it an absolute must-have. But from Facebook... well, they're a tech company, not a gaming company, so they're depending on someone else to make the games that will justify this thing. Maybe that'll work in the long term, but right now, it doesn't seem like there's any must-have VR game.
Add that all up, and this is a product that won't appeal to most gamers yet, and won't appeal to a lot of tech geeks due to the Windows focus, so... yeah.