All signs were pointing towards an escalation of VR on PS4. The promotions on social media, the patents being registered every other week, the constant sales and store visibility, etc.
After State of Play though, it has been made obvious for everyone to see. Regardless of what anybody thinks of Virtual Reality(this board seems to have a generally very low opinion of it), Sony will dive headfirst into PSVR for the Playstation 5.
They are funding a full Iron Man game for PSVR. This is fucking huge. It just might the biggest VR game made to date. Plus they've allocated more than half of the broadcast to PSVR alone.
How will PC companies respond? Will Microsoft follow them into this fight or hold back?
the ps5 deserves to fail hard if they're really going to focus on this vr shovelware, literally kinect 2.0.
John Johnson
VR is a meme. You should have realized this when the Virtual Boy flopped. It's just another inconvenient gimmick like the Kinect.
Zachary Butler
I do not like VR. But the last time this happened with Nintendo and motion controls they made a quadruple fuckton of money and brought in a casual audience that crushed you in numbers as an elephant would an ant.
I'm just saying. Even if i don't like what they're doing here, i can see the shadow of the foot looming above you all, ready to squash you soon, if this thing plays out like the last gimmick console did.
The thing about "VR shovelware" is that VR technology is already beyond that point. Shovelware is what you make when you need to sell software based on products the consumer does not know.
That's not what VR is anymore. Most people in the western world have seen it already, the media acknowledges it and so does large corporations. Hardware sales are in the millions and there's plenty of people making VR content, not just video games.
VR games are short because they must be cheap to create, the installed base is still short. This is changing slowly thanks to Sony though. You see shovelware around but there's definitely not-garbage stuff being made too.
Motion Controls took off because Nintendo put the full weight of their brand and tech behind it. Sony is doing the same with VR.
It's similar, but it's also totally different from the Wii. With the Wii, you can swing your arms around and aim with the remote, but you can also just sit down on your couch and just play a game on your television. With VR, you have to strap a headset to your face with a screen near your eyes and clear an area in your room so you don't blindly whack something with your arms. It's a neat gimmick at first, but it's going to pale in comparison to just plopping down on a couch or chair and just playing games with a regular controller. Gaming as a medium doesn't need to have some revolutionary change in how they're played because it's already been perfected. VR is better suited for stuff like museum virtual tours or something.
Austin Gutierrez
Imagine being so poor you have to convince yourself the non-poor are eating shit just to feel a bit better about your plight.
VR is definitely the future of something. In terms of videogames, it's the next logical step in immersion. Of course there are things holding it back now as there were in the 80s but slowly and steadily it is becoming more and more consumer ready.
The only point of contention I can see is that it's very hard to have a VR immersive experience without requiring a lot of apparatus to enable movement and decent haptic response. I've played a lot of VR and I've also played at VR parks in Japan and I'd find it hard to enjoy VR without all the gimmicks I experienced there. When you're sat in an actual go-kart that moves around and blows air in your face when you do crazy jumps etc. going back to just headset VR really sucks and you realize you're just sitting there with a screen closer to your face.
Lucas Davis
VR isn't here to replace pancake screens, it's a new way to play.
