That sounds like the review is valuable for most people, since most people would be interested in knowing about these complaints when making a purchase decision about the product.

I totally think VR is The Future, but I don't disagree with anything he said. It's an expensive toy for early adopters and developers, still. They're not going to sell millions of these in the first generation. The Vive won't either. I got to try it last week, and it's mind-blowing, but a) it takes up a lot of room and b) there are going to be casualties from room scale VR. Injuries and loss of furniture at least. I only watched people playing for 3 hours, and the guy doing the demo took an elbow to the ribs, and the 1500 pc they were using was tripped over.

I think we may well see VR-specific rooms in upper-middle class homes in the future. Or maybe home theatre rooms that can double as VR rooms.

Can we call them holodecks?

The operative word here is "mainstream"

Is ~50 million people "mainstream"? Considering he complained about downloading drivers this must be very easy to setup.

Gaming PC's used to be ~2,000$, this is 600 + 950PC = 1550$. https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/ Which is not free but hardly going to break most people. Don't forget this is just a mid-range gaming PC which many people are going to get anyway which drops this down to the cost of a high end cellphone.

PS: IMO, WoW was mainstream as a PC only MMO with a few million subscribers in the US.

World of Warcraft went mainstream because it didn't require a gaming PC to play in 2004.

There are more than 10x as many active Steam accounts (125m) vs active WoW accounts at it's peak (12m) in 2010.

Sure, a mid to low end PC could play WoW in 2004, but it only broke 2.5 million subscribers in late 2005. http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wow-sub... And 10m in 2008.

Give it 4 years and a GTX 970 will be a very low end graphics card.

Comparing the number of Steam accounts to WoW accounts is comparing apples to oranges. (And also makes an implicit assumption that everyone who has a Steam account has a gaming PC, which is not a good assumption.)

In 2004, Steam had no noteworthy buzz and its only purpose was Half-Life 2 DRM.

Steam survey actually provides good hardware numbers.

The important thing is with the number of Steam Users each 1% is more than 1 million people. Thus < 50% can still be a lot of people. (4.39% own a 970 GTX GPU, 0.92% own a 980 GTX GPU, 0.72% own a GTX 980 Ti ~= 7.5 million people who don't need to upgrade graphics card, now add ATI and SLI.)

PS: Active Steam account = bought something from steam AND logged on in the last 2 weeks. Which IMO is a much higher hurdle than most website tracking. And clearly not all gaming PC's are on Steam.

Steam often logs in on boot. I don't see this as a very interesting metric and certainly not related to the popularity of the first generation of a VR device.

How else are you going to estimate the number of PC's used for games that don't need to upgrade? Or even the number of PC gamers?

My 4-year-old GTX660 is a mid-range card even today. Give it five or six years.

A GTX 660 is a low end card. A GTX 950 is 150$ and ~5-10% faster than a GTX 660.

It is an old card that was fairly high-end when it came out. It matches the graphical capabilities of the PS4 today.

It's not low end, it's mid-range. HD at 60fps (often higher) on med-high settings on everything but the very most recent games (without MSAA).

Again, you'll probably need to wait more than 4 years for a high-end card to become "very low end". I'd give it five or six years.

IMO, sub 150 = low end, 150-320 = mid range, 320+ = high end. The 660 GTX is worse than a 150$ graphics card (GTX 950).

Granted, in terms of hardware people are currently using the GTX 660 might still be mid range.

Right. I was basing my comparison on performance rather than price. But in terms of price, you're absolutely correct, the GTX 660 isn't worth much.

> Is ~50 million people "mainstream"?

Where is this number coming from? Even the people I know interested in VR aren't exactly leaping to buy this first generation, and that's exactly what the review should (and does) reveal—you should continue waiting unless you want to deal with typical early adopter issues.

Yep, pretty big gamer here, have three of the current gen consoles, even bought a simple Google Cardboard peripheral to get a feel for VR, but I'm probably not going to drop serious cash on anything that's out there for at least a year, and until I see which way the wind is blowing. I'm excited for it, but it's too much money for me to spend right now.

If any go mainstream it will be the PS VR. Sony has 30m consoles out there, and it only costs $500 to get setup with PS VR. Total price is about $800-900.

Plug and play, games work great because they're designed for the system.

On the other hand with the Rift and the Vive you need a PC which has to be up to spec, the hardware is more expensive, etc.

I was looking though the Steam Survey and on the nVidia side ~7.5 million people have a nVidia GPU fast enough for the Rift. Add ATI and people upgrading this year and I think the market may be similar sized.

The real question IMO, is if you own both which do you add VR to?

For me the answer is easy. I don't have a good PC (just a 5 year old laptop that I don't use much) so going with a Rift or a Vive is a huge investment and requires me getting back into keeping a PC setup just for VR.

The PS VR is cheaper and I already keep that equipment setup. I don't need to worry about specs/etc. Plug and play. Plus the PS VR is cheaper.

For me I'd go with PS VR and see how that goes. If I really liked it then I might buy a Vive for my (we'll pretend I own a) gaming PC. I could sell the PS VR to offset the cost.

Don't own a console? Already hard-core into PC? Then just going straight to Vive/Rift makes plenty of sense if you're willing to buy in.

"Which is not free but hardly going to break most people" - most people make ~$4500 a month or less (pre taxes). $1550 is a big chunk of cash for most people.

Depends on context.

You can get a reliable used car for ~12k. Look at how many people spend 2+K more than that.

Owning a VR headset does not (yet) act as a prerequisite to get most jobs.

Spending more than ~12k stops being about basic transportation.

AKA if you buy a car for 20k vs 12k the extra 8k was not needed.

for a first gen 600 dollar headset that requires a 1000 dollar pc, i'm not sure this is really true

Isn't "the iPhone version of VR" exactly what would be considered mainstream though? That's what took smartphones mainstream as well.

It IS the iPhone of VR. The first iPhone didn't have over-the-air updates, over-the-air app installs, over-the-air music downloads. The screen was crap (compared to today).

Anyone off the street could pick up an iPhone and do something productive in a couple of minutes. Everyone who bought a first generation iPhone was pretty impressed with the product itself; it took me at least a week before I really wished I could install more software on it. And even so, it was still really useful.

Compare this to the Oculus Rift, the average person doesn't even have a machine they can plug it into. I mean, who even has a desktop computer anymore? Everyone I know has a laptop.

The product is clearly aimed at serious gamers who have the money to sink into serious gaming rigs. The iPhone-of-VR it certainly is not.

More than that, the first iPhone had no third-party apps period and still ran on the EDGE network. Even with all those limitations, it was still groundbreaking. The iPhone made everyone wake up and rethink what we were doing.

The comparison to VR is apt. It really is a game-changing technology.

"Game-changing" is a good way to think about it, too.

This ISN'T the future - but it's changed the game - we now how a different vision for what the future will be.

Why is everyone using the with-PC price when talking about the Rift? It's a peripheral, not a console.

The target market for this thing already has a gaming machine. It would be like releasing a really awesome gaming keyboard for $100, and having it characterized as costing $1500 since it implies the use of a powerful PC.

Is this bugging anyone else?

the 'mainstream' doesn't own a pc capable of running vr.

That's the problem though.

The VR PR machine is making it sound like these new VR headsets are something anyone can just buy, plugin and play with! But it's more complex than that.