Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You
by beloch on Monday March 31, 2014 @02:52PM
(#7503382)
AAA PC/console titles are out-grossing Hollywood and continue to grow every year. This explosive growth continued through the last console generation despite the high cost of the Xbox360 and PS3. A bigger danger for console makers is hardware saturation of the market. If gamers don't see compelling reasons to update to the new consoles, we could have another 1983 on our hands. VR, besides offering a potential edge in the console wars, could present a way to combat saturation. This is no doubt why Sony is pursuing VR so aggressively.
The mobile market is still comparatively tiny in terms of gross, but it must be pointed out that it is not incompatible with VR. Current handsets are not powerful enough to support VR but that will change in a few years. The question is, how much immersion do mobile users really want?
Argument: VR will be a niche market because most styles of gaming have diminishing returns on increased immersion. After all, even with continuous rises in graphics quality in the hardest of the hardcore market, the mass market seems to have refocused its preference-attention on game design around the time mass mobile gaming became a thing and game consoles started costing $400.