We are far past tech demos and concept games.
There's no non-nerd out there who thinks "maybe I'll try VR", and goes into a store to buy... whatever it is, goes home to have a great time with it, and immediately tells their friends. No, it's Linus Tech Tips upgrading his water-cooled living room PC with a special USB3 card just to get enough bandwidth to all the peripherals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFuLvGf0g0c
In fact, so many people literally went to Best Buy or Walmart to purchase a Quest that it has been sold out since the beginning of the year, online and off, with eBay pricing at 50%+ premiums.
You literally open the box, run an app on your phone (for configuration), put the HMD on your face and you're in VR. People not only tell their friends, but buy multiple versions to give to friends and family.
With Quest 2 at a $299 price point, the non-nerds saying "maybe I'll try VR" will happen even more often. The OculusQuest subreddit has a constant stream of questions about this very behavior. It is currently the ~2,000th most popular subreddit, with an impressive growth curve[1]. Some are literally buying the Quest 2 instead of the PS5 (though clearly a small number).
So far, 35 games have made over $1m on Quest alone, with one clearing that figure in 4 days and another in 8 days. Top games have made over $10m, not even including revenue from Steam, PSVR, or the Oculus PC VR platform. These aren't Epic / Apple level mega-wins, but many mobile developers would be happy with $5-10m revenue figures.
Upcoming VR games are coming from top tier publishers like Respawn (Medal of Honor), Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell), and Rockstar (unnamed AAA open world game)[2], Crytek (The Climb 2), and EA (Star Wars: Squadrons).
Additional games include Sniper Elite, Warhammer 40,000, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, Jurassic World Aftermath, and Myst. And this is just the tip of the iceberg from brands/publishers you may know.
Point being, stand-alone VR has really addressed many of your (and the market's) concerns.
And, to be fair, in your linked video Linus was trying to use optional, expensive peripherals for full-body tracking while streaming - not exactly a mass-market use case.
1. Facebook funds many of these games; think of it like a first-party game made to drive sales of a new console. The developer gets paid up front, Facebook recoups the revenue via incremental sales of HMDs and software on their store.
2. Note that many games are VR offshoots of existing IPs. This means the opportunity for asset re-use and consequently lower costs.
3. "High quality" and "big budget" are not equivalent. There is a huge spectrum between a tech demo and a flagship title with 400-500 people working on it (as is the case of AC). AAA-caliber, lengthy games can be made by teams of 50-75.
4. Again, those revenue numbers are on Quest only. PSVR is an even larger market, and PC VR (Vive, Index, WMR, Rift) is probably about the same size.
The most important point though is that if your entry point requires Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, or The Last of Us, then it is indeed too early.
However, the two hottest non-VR games right now are Fall Guys and Among Us - great, high quality games come in all sizes.
It does feel like the goalposts are being placed wherever VR isn't.
This is definitely a thing that happens with the Oculus Quest already. The hardware is easy to use and the software library is pretty much in place now. A major marketing campaign could make it really take off.
I don't have any insight into FB VR's decision to require the login on Oculus devices now, but my guess is that they consider the device to be ready for a mass market, and believe that the gains from the social graph will be worth the short-term pain of leaving early-adopter money on the table from here on.
I think the Quest showed FB that they had a potential winner on their hands and the Quest 2 is moving out of MVP phase to mass market phase. They are gambling that this is going to take off in a big way and they pushed hard to get an improved version out there and ramp up their manufacturing faster than most thought they would. They clearly want to be first to the "Oasis" with Horizon if that's ever going to be a thing and the FB login is a piece of that. If this is a flop, it will be a huge disappointment to the execs. If it's a win then FB may have been first to plant their flag in our VR future, for better or for worse.
(It's popular enough that Sony actually has made a second iteration of the headset, but it's not an upgrade.)
It's not as accessible as the Oculus Quest, but the PS4 has sold roughly 106 million units to date, and gamers are probably the biggest market at present for VR devices.
VR needs more than that.
Is there anything in VR apps/games that’s even passingly familiar to 1% of average people?
Personally, I know Myst has been ported to VR and that there’s some way to watch NBA games in VR but that’s about it.
I played too much half-life in my college days and think of it as fun campy sci-fi. Stuff like press e to move this dead body is suddenly this viscerally horrific experience.
You picked up a box of matches accidentally? Read the label. Found a pen draw something.
oh and myst is coming, MYST.
Games with that constraint are limited. You could do ping-pong. Shooting galleries.
Also cockpits seem to reduce nausea thus opening up another broad category.
It's mostly smooth first person motion with strafing and smooth turning that is problematic.
I hate that we live in a world so dominated by network effects, economies of scale, corporate consolidation, and shareholder value that there are fewer and fewer realms where "small success" still exists.
You're right that some sort of ready player one metaverse thing is probably on that level, but creating genuinely interesting, fun VR experiences that may in many ways be more interesting and unique does not to me seem beyond the scope of small scale business.
In a sense VR is one of the purest versions of that sort of cyberspace idealism, it's an escape hatch away from curated, corporate products to whatever people want to make. So I'm not pessimistic that creative people find things to built.
Real wealth is, you know... actual wealth. It's being able to start a high 6-figure to 8-figure business (or even smaller if you are satisfied) and not being laughed at as a failure. It's being able to buy rather than rent everything you want to buy. It's having productive assets.
I suspect this is a bit of a SV bubble viewpoint. I don't think that in the general population, if you tell people you are pulling 8-figures in your business, you would be considered a failure.
If by "productive assets" you mean income/revenue producing, then I'm not sure we can all have that. Many assets like that require some else to pay rent.
That you personally care more about starting a business than about using a VR headset is not really relevant.
It's not cut-and-dry bad the way we do things, but there is a lack of balance. There's a lot wrong that could be better if it wasn't someone's perverse bread and butter. Extreme wealth and power inequality, whether for people or companies, don't make for a just, healthy society.
If you want to strengthen workers, create more demand for jobs, so that workers have options. By for example creating a successful VR industry, you create demand for more jobs that haven't previously existed, thereby empowering workers. Somebody who has previously been exploited to manufacture fridges can now give their boss the finger and go manufacture chips for VR headsets instead. One easy way to create more jobs is to hire a cleaning person, by the way. Everybody who is concerned about "living wages" and things like that should start by hiring cleaners and possibly gardeners for their homes.
I personally think the whole concept of "workers" is bunk. Everybody is a free agent entering contracts with other market participants. That's it. "Worker" is a social construct, actually, a socialist construct. More so, being a "worker" does not sound like a very desirable state of affairs, so I think society should work towards getting rid of workers.
The success of mega projects (iphone, etc.) creates a massive supply chain (mostly in China) of people putting things together in different ways to make random stuff.
E.g.: http://www.arcadeguns.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&p... I was just looking at this to turn our entire wall into a shooting arcade with Aimtrak lightguns to help kill time during the winter pandemic.
This was not possible ten years ago.
As a society we need a way to determine where we invest resources. Some of those metrics you mentioned, though not perfect, are proxies for evaluating whether or not we should be investing more in certain tech. Otherwise, how would we determine where we should spend our limited resources?
For another example, to make a modern movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It is only possible to make them because there are many people who will possibly watch it and pay for it. Nobody would be able to film the Lord of The Rings trilogy in their own basement just for their own entertainment. Not yet, anyway - tools of the future may make it possible ("GPT-300, make me a good movie based on the LOTR books").
It won't likely ever be as big of a platform as smartphones are, though. So I overall agree with you.
Don't forget that the current generation of VR hardware has roots back to a Kickstarter project. Billions of dollars are investment aren't needed.
Half Life: Alyx is a fantastic AAA game that in no way feels like a proof of concept. Strongly recommend playing it. (Beat Saber too)
There's a third possibility - VR is finally here and consumer market is what it is. It's not going to take over the world but it isn't going away either.