The death of video game VR is a crying shame – Reader’s Feature

After buying a PSVR2 and a Meta Quest 3, a reader laments that a potential golden age for VR gaming already seems to have come to an end.

I’m in my late 40s now and for my whole life VR has been something that has always been claimed as the future of gaming and technology in general. The idea has never really changed, it’s always been a headset stuck awkwardly to your head, except of course it’s only recently that we’ve had graphics that are in any way good enough to make it worth doing.

Since I’ve always been interested in the concept, I got a PlayStation VR headset for the PlayStation 4 and was very impressed. The controls were not great, and Sony’s support for it was a bit of a minimum effort, but it had tons of indie style games, and I don’t regret buying it all.

I can’t say the same about the PlayStation VR2, though, which has been a huge waste of money and which Sony only ever released one game for (Horizon Call Of The Mountain). Because I’m an idiot though, I went ahead and got a Meta Quest 3 as well and while that was a lot better, with a lot of really great games, the closure of a bunch of Meta’s developers makes it obvious that the format, and the whole concept of gaming VR, is dead now.

When the original PlayStation VR came out there was a ton of excitement around VR. Lots of other headsets came out at the same time and big publishers started doing short experiments for their games, from Call Of Duty to Final Fantasy. Capcom was the most enthusiastic though and the VR mode for Resident Evil Village is still one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time. They carried on long after others gave up too, although I don’t see any sign of them doing anything for Resident Evil Requiem.

That’s not exactly a surprise because when Meta shut down the makers of Deadpool VR and Asgard’s Wrath, and basically shut down the Batman: Arkham Shadow team as well, I think that was pretty much the official end of gaming VR, at least for the next decade or two.

Those three were amazing games and I guess most people never got to play them (or they would’ve sold better and the developers wouldn’t have been shut down) but Asgard’s Wrath was kind of a Skyrim style role-playing game which is basically one of my favourite games ever, while Batman: Arkham Shadow was better than Arkham Knight, as far as I’m concerned, and managed to do all the gameplay of the flat screen games but in VR.

It’s extra frustrating because these games are so good and they seemed like they were going to be the start of a new golden age for VR games. Instead, they were just a glimpse of what could be and what we’ll probably never see again. There are still interesting lower budget games, like the excellent V-Racer Hoverbike, but I think even those are starting to dry up now.

There’s no big mystery about why this happened. Headsets are expensive and people have less money now, so they’re not buying enough to justify spending a lot of money on VR games. I don’t know how that would change either, unless headsets magically get cheaper to make, but considering console prices keep going up that seems very unlikely.

I’ve heard people say that VR will only truly take-off when it’s just the size of a pair of glasses, but I don’t think that’s a particularly big issue. The problems are the price and the fact that you’re cutting yourself off from the rest of the world while you’re using it, which is something my wife doesn’t like in particular.

That’s not going to change whether the headset is like a pair of sunglasses or not. I imagine at some point the technology will get to that point, so I guess we’ll see, but I think there’s going to be a huge time gap between then and now, when VR gaming is going to be effectively dead.

By reader Grobby

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