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[freank]

HTC’s core business has faced a major downturn in the past decade, with its stock falling 75 percent in the past five years and nearly 95 percent since its all-time high in April of 2011. The company is currently worth about $1.8 billion.

HTC might be looking to sell or spin off its Vive virtual reality business

[Raptor85]

honestly i think the problem with HTC is more of the fact that their last few generations of phones have been absolute shit compared to LG and samsung's offerings, and that's their major moneymaker, not VR.  Their VR sets are selling just fine, especially when you consider they're STILL the more expensive option (occulus has come WAY down in price, and imho has the better handgrips anyways), I'd think they're more considering selling it off to cut down corporate size and get some quick money to keep their primary business afloat.

[ViktorTheBoar]

HTC still makes phones?

[solid_snake17]

I think the problem with VR is that it is still new to the market and it lacks marketing. It definitely has the potential to be the next big thing in the games industry but it needs more time and public intention. Most companies today are committed to developing VR games (Valve, Bethesda, etc.)

[Cobralad]

headset is big and bulky, so yes, it would be hard to eat pussy

[Woseseltops]

To answer your main question 'Is VR going down?': nah I don't think so. The first wave of interest was when people experienced how cool VR was. As a result, a number of small companies and lots of small companies are make VR games. The next wave will come when one company (mark my words: it will be Valve) succeeds in making super high quality VR game that blows everybody's mind. Problem is, we don't know when that second wave will come; it could be any day now, but it could also take another ten years.

[Schrompf]

On the other side there's me, thinking that VR never even got momentum outside of a small crowd. I mean... look at this thread: it tries to provoke by a dramatic title, and next to nobody even gives a fuck. I think VR is like Kinect/Move Control - has a few titles that try to play to its strength, and some still think it's revolutionary, but in the end it turned out that most players don't like controlling via body movements. Wii got some audience with its simple sports games, but VR has the additional problem of the player being completely shielded from the environment, which prohibits the social interactions that the Wii games benefited from.

So yeah, maybe VR will never take off. Or maybe it's the next big thing and I'm just being an old and bitter fart. Who knows. We'll see.

[Türbo Bröther]

I've always thought that VR was cool. I'm old enough and hopelessly pathetic enough to remember watching The Lawnmower Man, seeing footage of Dactyl Nightmare and looking on jealously at the kids who could afford to play Zone Hunter and that boxing game at the arcade. That and how all the magazines banged on about VR kinda ingrained it upon my mind. VR the concept was pretty cool but VR the reality? Not really but not even the shittiness of early VR put me off thinking it was cool. I thought that my VR dreams were to remain dreams which is why I've only recently come back around to being really hot on it since it finally looks like they've nailed it. VR is just in reach but reality snatched it away from me again because I don't have a thousand downunder dollars to drop on a Vive. Only rich people and young people who're loose with their parent's money can afford that. It's going to have to be heavily discounted before I jump on board.

I'll get there some day, I will have VR before I die and I will not accept any other scenario.

So yeah, maybe VR will never take off. Or maybe it's the next big thing and I'm just being an old and bitter fart. Who knows. We'll see.

I'll tell you when VR will take off, when Virtuality games finally get emulated in MAME.

[diegzumillo]

I don't think so but it will be better directed eventually. Right now VR doesn't have a place. It's not really meant for party games, as it's expensive and clunky, so whoever owns these things will own only one. And while it's attached to motion controls it will never be immersive enough for immersive games.

My best guess is VR (as in headset only) will catch on when it starts to be recognized mainly as a big ass display on your head, providing peripheral vision and depth perception. For that to happen there needs to be some awesome games that make use of the headset but play with mouse and keyboard or regular gamepad.

[Schoq]

As everyone predicted, VR failed to ever recover from this devastating setback:

[ProgramGamer]

Please post all the photoshoped versions of this cover.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

[Raptor85]

On the other side there's me, thinking that VR never even got momentum outside of a small crowd. I mean... look at this thread: it tries to provoke by a dramatic title, and next to nobody even gives a fuck. I think VR is like Kinect/Move Control - has a few titles that try to play to its strength, and some still think it's revolutionary, but in the end it turned out that most players don't like controlling via body movements. Wii got some audience with its simple sports games, but VR has the additional problem of the player being completely shielded from the environment, which prohibits the social interactions that the Wii games benefited from.

So yeah, maybe VR will never take off. Or maybe it's the next big thing and I'm just being an old and bitter fart. Who knows. We'll see.

not all games control by body movements, as a matter of fact some of my favorites are the ones that use fairly standard controls and use the VR to simply augment the immersion of the player (the head position and the like is only used for changing view angle, etc).  Elite Dangerous is my personal favorite, it's absolutely fucking incredible in VR, it's impossible to even describe how incredibly cool even a "mundane" activity like docking in a space station is with VR. There's also a fairly short but EXTREMELY good mystery/horror game called "Dead Secret" I enjoyed a lot.  Resident Evil 7 is pretty amazing in VR too, I've gotten to try it and will buy the game the second the PC version launches VR support (It's amazing but tbh the game looks like ASS on the ps4 compared to the pc version)  I would KILL for legend of grimrock to make a VR version.  Subnautica is an amazing game, unfortunately while the VR in it rocks it forces you to use hardcoded xbox controls with it on which REALLY suck.

- 3d Adventure/mystery/horror games
- Flight and space sims
- Dungeon Crawlers

So far those seem to be the best genre's in VR, the physics games are cool but honeslty most are little more than half-competent minigames, but whatever, they sell so people will keep making them.

[ThemsAllTook]

Don't forget about porn. We're only just starting to scratch the surface of interactive erotic simulations.

I feel like VR is already well on its way to finding a comfortable niche. I don't buy into the idea that it has to be something that absolutely everyone owns at this point. It'll certainly be nice for prices to come down and accessibility to increase, but it seems to me like there are enough enthusiasts now who are able to afford it to allow for a healthy ecosystem.

[s0]

vr is like surround sound: surround speaker setups for home use have existed since the early 70s, yet most people still use the "antiquated" stereo format in 2017. just like home surround sound, vr is too inconvenient to use to ever become mainstream but it probably won't go away.

[Schoq]

what if humans as a species just on average really don't care that much about playing games with a screen stuck to their face really close to the eyes

[Schoq]

it probably doesn't help that 100% of promotional material for vr stuff looks like this



who in their right mind would want to be or be associated with that guy

[Cobralad]

aw cmon it looked like masamune shirow stuff and everyone retroactively thinks it was uncool all along

[Schoq]

Turns out it didn't work as well when not on a 1980s manga cyborg woman

[J-Snake]

who in their right mind would want to be or be associated with that guy

I don't see a reason why anyone should be bothered by that. The fact won't go away that VR has value in enhancing immersion.