I mean we will never know but 5billion is a lot no one else is going to throw this much to VR. Gaben will buy another Yacht before valve spends this much. Apple will never care about gaming. Microsoft and google both develop as though they can’t focus on any project.

Sony has a nice headset, but it’s more of a whatever than a serious evolution of the industry.

Itch.io hosts some amazing game jams, and maybe we will see Godot and Unreal take up some slack but not five billion dollars worth.

[–] Eggyhead@lemmings.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Sony has a nice headset, but it’s more of a whatever than a serious evolution of the industry.

This sentiment exists because Meta sunk gargantuan losses into engineering progress that the burgeoning VR market couldn’t possibly have managed naturally. If you took meta and the quest 3 out of the VR picture entirely, I believe the psvr2 would still be a good bar for where high quality, affordable, modern VR would be. There would be no outstanding AAA VR meta exclusives, but who’s to say a few of those might not have been made anyway? On better hardware and non-exclusive, no less.

Furthermore, if all those people who opted for Quest 3 when choosing what to buy ended up on other platforms, the incentive for developers to develop VR features for their games wouldn’t be restricted to mobile only and on a terrible store front. I think we would have seen a lot more studios take the Resident Evil route and add VR modes to their games because the VR audience would be on platforms that would require less compromise, and it would be larger than it is now. I believe we would have had fewer, but much better games in VR by now.