big deep rabbit hole but if people pay $450 for a pair of sunglasses and $400 for a cell phone it's kinda silly to say that VR is overly expensive

The rift is mostly a cheap ~1080p screen, gryros, expensive headphones and the sensor

it costs $400 for a 70" 4k TV at walmart in the US now

so the redirection of funds could go towards the VR kit if popular culture and a team of attractive streamers starts to generate that mindshare to create demand

people seek the lust-worthy items instead of investing in something silly like a 401k

a $500 VR kit seems like a natural progression

Also yes, they're different experiences, competitive games and casual games are more like board games, either something you want to be good at to prove yourself but for most people something to do with friends while immersive games try to immerse you in a different world and amaze you

yup... so VR is perfect for that market

the Nintendo Switch takes the more common ground road

there's an intersection of the two that would hopefully evolve things further

be it AR or local multiplayer "copilots" who remain in the "real world"

The BoM of a rift is ~$200(and could be reduced even more by larger scale), they could cut the price quite a bit if they were confident and wanted to get VR into homes

the worst thing is lukewarm press

tohsaka rin has left!

if it was slashed in price today and people bought them up cheap, and it became like pokemon go, it would be a disaster

But they're playing it safe and making customers pay for all the RND so if they fail they wont have huge losses.

a VR shop needs good rapport with developers

if they made a dust-magnet doorstop right off that bat for the sake of being first to market then they might as well say they're making it a totally open platform for everyone and they're just going to liquidate and become a nonprofit organization

because it commodizes everything they've made

race to the bottom is not good

The closest I can think of like that is battlefield, very immerive while having fun and lasting mechanics, and they had the commander mode in bf4. Commander mode failed though since the commander couldnt do much.

hopefully the money they make goes towards investments in better development tools

Somethng like that needs loads of both CPU and GPU horsepower though

games like battlefield and mechwarrior would definitely benefit, and are obvious choices for launch titles, but i'd hazard to guess that the blockbuster titles in that vein would be much more interesting than that

i'm sad there aren't more games that try that RTS+FPS formula since it can be fun, albeit hard to balance

world of warships kinda does that with carriers

anyway there are people getting paid to do this stuff, rest assured

nintendo can have my mcbucks

for not following the pack at least

But a cheaper VR sets would mean incentive for people to acctually make serious games, which are almost nonexistant atm, they'll have to get them out before others will invest in games for them. Hype also dies down, and it wont come back for a good while once it's a flop in peoples mind.

It wouldnt make them more of a comodity, other than being less of luxury items, it'd acctually make more competition less likely to enter the market if they pushed out the best product for a good price.

And I dont rest assured about anything in gaming, I see little but decline.

you might be right, we wouldn't know without more empircal data

rts+fps?

so EVE?

the oldest example i can think of is Starsiege Tribes and the Battlezone reboot from 1999

in a weird way, MOBAs capture that feel since it's so monomanically skewed towards one unit

Shame about mobas that't theyre so much more about pure skill than fun tactics.

i'd enjoy playing an FPS against player-programmed AI

so folks would throw together some strategy and loadout against incoming human attackers who have all the disadvantages except "superior" realtime adaptability

When we were new to mobas we'd talk strategies and even draw at a whiteboard at a LAN, but eventually we realized that's pointless at normal levels of play (Maybe even at pro?) since it's mostly about the skill.