Osiris397 Posted January 28 Share Posted January 28 I found these news stories a couple of weeks ago and they confirmed some things I thought. NWN blogs: Quest 2 VR Usage/sales rates: This article basically states that most people that bought Quest 2s didn't buy many games and didn't engage with VR content online much: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/01/quest-2-vr-usage-sales-rates.html RoadtoVR: Quest Sales, 20 million, Retention Struggles This article essentially has Facebook officials confirm the struggles and promise efforts to do better: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-struggles/ UploadVR: Quest 3 appears to have sold at least 1 million units After a year and maybe a half the Quest 3 sales: https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-3-sold-at-least-1-million-units/ Ok, so the Quest 2 sold roughly 5 Million units per year, but now that part of the user base is effectively dead. In the last 8+ years there has been a linear decline Meta investment into the VR space (advertising particularly) even while they are spending billions per quarter still to support it, so it seems more like a billionaire's vanity project than a real business, as such support could be completely yanked from it at any time. On top of that a lot of the years of holiday advertisement blitzing was somewhat, to be kind, misleading. It's possible the company burned up whatever goodwill with customers that they had. Games media generally refuses to highlight any of these facts even though they are critically important for a lot of people considering purchasing a Quest. From a PCVR/Quest Youtube Influencer walking away from making Quest content for these reasons: Ultimately, I don't think VR is cooked and PSVR2 strikes the right balance in a lot of areas for a lot of different reasons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
killamch89 Posted January 28 Share Posted January 28 My issue is that I feel that the VR space in general has stagnated over the past 8 years. When VR burst onto the scene in the 2015 up to 2017, there was a lot of development. But ever since that, it seems to have been put on the backburner by most companies that were originally spearheading its development. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scorpion Posted January 30 Share Posted January 30 It’s frustrating to see the disconnect between sales figures and user engagement. The Quest's potential is overshadowed by poor retention and misleading marketing. A sustainable future for VR needs genuine investment and transparent communication. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osiris397 Posted February 11 Author Share Posted February 11 On 1/28/2025 at 6:50 PM, killamch89 said: My issue is that I feel that the VR space in general has stagnated over the past 8 years. When VR burst onto the scene in the 2015 up to 2017, there was a lot of development. But ever since that, it seems to have been put on the backburner by most companies that were originally spearheading its development. I don't know that it has completely stagnated, but mobile graphics based VR has a hard ceiling and Sony has been mostly willing to concede to Meta's billions used to corner the market on VR developers. Typically in the Fall since the original PSVR release Sony has organized bigger holiday VR launches, which have apparently been successful as this is the 8th year with Metro, Aliens, Behemoth (VR Shadow of the Colossus) with Wanderer and Hitman: The World of Assassination promoted in the Fall for Spring releases. Obviously, it's not enough and remaking Playstation's first party titles of the past (PS3 and further back) could have and maybe should have the safer and more successful path they would have been innovate much further along by now, but that wasn't the path they chose, both because of questionable leadership decisions during the first generation of PSVR and then allocating massive resources to failed high risk projects during this generation of PSVR2. Previous leadership in both cases let VR down. While not impossible, it's difficult for me to see new leadership being any more conservative with VR development PSVR2 than the prior groups. The problem with PCVR from a development standpoint has always been the low volume of users with all the necessary hardware to run a high end VR game that wouldn't get them sick, but never really bought a ton of games. Without being heavily subsidized it very quickly became a "no bueno" for most studios that weren't named Valve. Most studios just weren't going to gamble with their mortgage money and then hope for the best, which is why it became the domain of Valve and they only built one game. Meta had a lot of developers over a barrel and railroaded them into Quest development. To me the road out of this mess is through more aggressive PSVR2 1st party development that grows VR as platform until there's a locked in LCD (lowest common denominator) standard that's significantly higher than the mobile standard. After that PCVR will have an opportunity to flourish particularly with Steam VR if Steam releases a console and. a new VR HMD for that console. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osiris397 Posted February 11 Author Share Posted February 11 UploadVR article: A memo was recently leaked from Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth noting “Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.” 2025, it is said then, will determine whether Meta's hardware and metaverse division is “the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure”. Meta's shifting priorities adversely affecting developers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
