I never understood current VR fans stubbornness of not wanting the VR scene today to die so new technology can bring it back in another 5-10 years with new tech and implementation that would make the idea more appealing and more marketable to consumers. Instead we have people desperately trying to avoid the stats and pushing to save headsets that aren't in many areas much different than in 2016.
When 3D glasses were out from the red magnet lens, to the plastic white green and red, than later the plastic white blue and red glasses, then the metal blue and red glasses using lens instead of plastic covers, transparent 3D, and then glasses free, no one was desperately trying to save companies putting out their takes or implementations of red and blue white plastic glasses. No one was doing that the fans used them but knew that those were not going to be the long-term implementations of the 3D TV idea and the concept evolved over time.
But for some reason people since the hysterics from 2016 making this generation of VR seem like "this is it", are still advocating that we are almost there.
People like to go after the death of 3D TV, but when 3D TV's returned last, they shipped 2M 3D TV's in 2010, 24M in 2011, 41M in 2012, and 44M in 201 . This still ended up dying off a few years later because the use and appeal was limited. But I'm sure it will come back with a new implementation as it has several times before that will become appealing for a new age and new generation.
In comparison, VR has never sold 15m in it's best year and for most years has sold less than 10M and has been trending downward for some time.
People will bring u the Quest 2. Fair enough, but from a game developer perspective there's nothing about the Quest 2 that would make you want to put a ton of money on Virtual Reality. Meta can tout whatever number they sold, estimates suggest by now it has passed 20M, but that's just a number.
If you have 20M headsets in the wild but your MP or gaas-lite games don't have a high number of players or you aren't seeing game announcements of 3-4M copies sold, then what's the context behind that 20M? The reason for the sales were two changes compared to other headsets with the Quest was still a new thing: Price and wireless. Period.
Apple may sell a couple million just because of the brand and some businesses and art academies may do something with it on top of the hardcore fans, but there's nothing about their headset that's much different than Quest or Sony's implementation and it shares many of the same problems and has created several new ones. Also unlike what some believe, Apple isn't interested because of seeing growth, they were working on their headset against the suggestions of their own internal leadership for years so the best we got was better lends and a more comfortable strap but similar design ideology from 2016.
If you can't sell units, if you can't have games with 5M players buying MTX, if you don't have the retention for gaas, why would developers poor money on the medium as it is now? There needs to be radical change in VR but many current fans aren't seeing that.
