For the price of a movie ticket and a coke, you can get a dozen hours of entertainment. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.

And the $60 are AAA games where you'd easily get 30-40 hours worth. These have budgets of ~$70 million; they have to make their money back somehow.

One of the secondary reasons I've avoided Oculus is that it is a closed system; you can only buy from a single provider. You're much more likely to find sales on VR games on Steam.

Video games on Steam are the best ROI for entertainment period, right up there with a good pair of hiking boots.

Or maybe the movie ticket with overpriced coke is just a bad deal?

A lot of it is also pretty relative down to a personal level and preferences: Some people can entertain themselves with a deck of cards, not even worth $1, for a nearly unlimited amount of time.

Think about entertainment options and name one that is a better deal than $60 for 20 hours worth. It's just not common, perhaps outside of books. Life is expensive and publicly available entertainment is far from an exception.

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I buy most of my Oculus games on Steam, not the oculus store. Half Life Alyx is a Valve game after all.

"Superhot VR" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 6 hours.

"Star wars: Tales from the galaxy's edge" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 4 hours.

I think the longest single player VR game that exists now is "The Walking dead: saints & sinners" (40$) which is around 11-14 hours long, but it is barely linear, it is more like a fallout/far cry game but with far less interesting locations. Completionist have played it for 30 hours in total.

There's also a ton of free/discounted games on the Epic store, 3rd party key resellers, and subscriptions like Xbox Gamepass. These are all possible because the PC remains an open, competitive platform - so that point stands.

Along with that they killed the four packs that used to be common for multiplayer games.

We've seen this all before with the iOS App Store and the end game is just everything free with intrusive ads.

The point in chasing customers like me is that I won't watch ads, but I will spend money, even $20+ for an iOS game. Streaming services have figured this out and offer ad-free versions. Some iOS developers will allow you to pay for a game to remove ads. (The problem on iOS is there is no easy way to determine which games are like this, or to filter based on things like this in search.)

How do you go into a shared VR environment and have ads appear for one user and not another?

I'm on-board with "just make everyone pay for apps" but it's very hard to decide what's going to be worth $30. My favorite VR game is free, but I went ahead and paid for the optional content (non functional) because I want to support the developers.

But that’s only one half of the story. The other is how tools, assets, hardware, knowledge and training have become much more affordable, streamlined and widespread.

What used to be a somewhat niche industry with barely any formal entry ways, is now a massively formalized industry dwarfing even Hollywood.

Just the publishing side alone saw a massive falling of gates with the emergence of the indie scene. IMHO there are very real economies of scale effects to this.

15 years ago games were still largely physical. That $60 included the physical games, cases, manuals, distribution, warehousing, etc. These days everything being digital companies don't have to pay that anymore. Sure there's a commission you have to pay on Steam/EGS but I highly doubt it's close to what having a physical distribution method cost.

So the way the $60 pie is split up today is totally different, and I imagine a much, much larger portion of that goes to the developers.

Not really. $60 is an introductory price, but most games at that price launch with at least one $80+ special edition and are supplemented with $40+ of post-launch content with much higher margins than the original game. And that's before considering some of the more contentious monetization practices like micro-transactions and "loot boxes". In many cases devs and publishers slash the initial price of a game shortly after launch (usually a year or two) to increase player counts, because more players generally means more sales of post-launch content.

And that's something else nobody ever seems to bring up when discussing the stagnant price of video games - the ever-increasing sales volumes. The cost of producing additional copies of a game is negligible, especially with the rise of digital distribution, so each copy sold after breaking even is pure profit. Since there is basically no production cost, developers (in theory, at least) dump part of their profit into the development of their next title. This allows them to stay competitive and results in skyrocketing budgets. The high budgets are a sign of a successful industry, not a struggling one.

Despite the increasing budgets and seemingly stagnant launch prices, video game developers are more profitable than ever. It's because they are selling more copies than ever and have figured out plenty of ways to bring in extra revenue after the initial sale. If you ask me, things should go the opposite direction. A huge selection of cheap, high-quality indie titles have affected the relative value of "AAA" titles, to the point where I rarely consider spending full price on a game launched at $60. Either way, the industry has recently been dipping its toes in the water with a new $70 shelf price. We'll see if it sticks.

The benefit of ads is that ad space appreciates -- because Facebook controls supply, and revenue follows inflation and demand.

So as GP alluded to, this can be summarized as Facebook saying "We'd like to have bigger future profit margins on VR."