Comment by johnfernow

I'm pretty sure the whole VR industry is an op by Big Closet to sell more closets.

I have 9000 hours in steamVR... on linux. I can never go back to 2D tbh.

This headset looks like it finally brings the full experience and more out of the dev only space.

It was a daily driver for me. I game in waves. Sometimes an hour or 2 a day, then I will take a break for awhile. I found a lot of really excellent titles on the Quest. I had an absolute blast, but recently gave the headset away after about 2 years of heavy use. I’ll admit that I was choosing VR specially because I wanted to get a good sense of what Apple and Meta are pouring billions into as a bet for the future of computing.

One conclusion for me is that great software is great! There’s not much of a library on Quest, but the few gems pulled me in like my first game console all over again, an addicting and polished game paired with incredible immersion.

Another conclusion for me is that VR is uncomfortable in many ways. You have to stand and move for long stretches. You perform repetitive actions that can hurt your hands, your arms, your shoulders. The current hardware is heavy and awkward. It cuts you off from the world, restricts your field of view and prevents you from eating or drinking. And maybe worst of all, it creates bizarre dissociations between movement and body, eyes and objects, reality and unreality.

I still think the tech has incredible potential. One day we will live in an immersive physical/digital environment that will respond to our slightest intentions. But I now think this tech is decades away before it becomes as easy and ubiquitous as a cell phone.

If you want a really good peek at computing in 2050, pick up this Apple headset.

I used to spend a lot of time in Pavlov. Was playing PavZ pretty much every day. Then one day I stopped, and haven’t really been back. There’s definitely a lot of activation energy that goes into “getting into VR” and once you’re out, you don’t really want to put in the effort to get back in. HL Alyx was a big motivator for me, but I haven’t felt like that for other games yet.

The fact that you cant walk around in the games really is a dealbreaker. It would be a nobrainer for all consoles if it werent for that unfortunate detail

I use my Quest pro to play video games that trick me into cardio workouts. Due to my body tiring out and the battery life, I play a max of two hours a day.

It probably eats up less than half of my video game time. I find that I play less video games now since VR is a different experience from pupetting an avatar with a game controller. You tend to use your whole body, which is great if you cant find the motivation to workout.

About ~1h20m per day in a two-days-on-one-day-off interval in modded PC version of Beat Saber with custom song maps on a Quest 2 with "frankenquest" setup. It's surprisingly decent cardio. Been doing it for over a year at this point and have racked up several hundred hours of playtime.

In my case well over 90% - for simracing. Pancake mode doesn't come close for me, it's an entirely different experience.

However more than 2 hours straight is far more tiring in VR but for me that's due to eye fatigue rather than the HMD.

> A question I ask of all VR gaming enthusiasts: how much time do you spend on VR games versus other games?

My Oculus CV1 has been back in its box for several years now. I really enjoyed Eagle Flight, but that's about it. Turns out not that many games were designed for someone like me who wanted to play VR games with mouse and keyboard behind his desk, and those that were were mostly driving/flying sims. The experience of having a motorcycle helmet with a small and not very bright visor didn't help. If I buy another VR set, it will be the one where I'm finally allowed to use my peripheral vision.

Infinite is my answer. I sit down all day at my desk job. I like to move in my free time. VR gets me up and moving, I love that. I don't play console or PC games at all.

> but I still haven't met anybody for whom it's a daily driver, or who spends most of their gaming time using it.

I think the last time I grabbed my VR headset was when my neck was getting tired but I still wanted to use my computer (laying down on my back). It actually worked!

I have a vive original and played about 200 hours of vr games. Haven’t taken it out of the box for years though because I don’t have the space for it anymore and just don’t really care about VR gaming that much.

For the past 5 years or so, it has gone in spurts for me: no time in VR for months (sometimes even a year or more at a time), then nearly all my gaming time is in VR for a couple months or so.

Since the PSVR2's release, when I hang out with one of my friends, I play one of his VR games almost every time I'm there. That undoubtedly won't last forever, but it definitely has the best launch library of any headset so far IMO.

Maybe I'm just a really picky gamer, but for any given console generation, there are only a handful of games I truly love, but it's easier to enjoy a fine but not incredible game on a flat screen than it is in VR. A really good VR game makes you forget about everything else and gives you an experience unachievable outside of VR. If you're immersed in a story, a song, or intense gameplay, you forget about any discomfort coming from the headset being on your face. But if you're not enjoying it then you're going to get annoyed a lot faster than you would sitting on the couch looking at a TV.

That said, the PSVR 2 is looking to have the best library of VR games yet. Previously, you'd have incredible one-off titles such as Half-Life: Alyx release on Steam but then nothing for months or years, but Sony seems really committed to providing a large number of high-quality AAA experiences on the headset. It also has a ton of great games from smaller studios (most of which were already on Steam or the Quest, but with such big libraries on both of those platforms, they were kind of tough to find throughout all the mediocre titles: this isn't an argument in favor of stronger curation, just an observation.)

Nonetheless, I don't expect it to make up the majority of time someone would play video games anytime soon, and there are two reasons:

1. Most people don't have VR headsets yet, so even if I personally prefer Pavlov to other FPSs, only two of my friends have VR headsets, so it's not replacing those flat screen games. Maybe one day, but currently the most popular games run on nearly everything: Fortnite, Minecraft, Apex, Overwatch, CS:GO, LoL, DOTA2, Valorant, Rocket League, etc. I doubt those games' popularity stems entirely from the fact they're on tons of platforms OR have very low PC requirements (or are free to play, minus Minecraft), but it likely helps.

2. Nearly all VR gamers play flat screen games, but the majority of flat screen gamers do not have VR headsets. The Quest 2 may have sold around 20 million units, but nearly all of those owners likely have a Switch, PlayStation, Xbox or gaming PC. Medium-sized studios certainly are incentivized to create VR games due to less competition (getting a game released for PSVR2 nearly guarantees at least some sales, unlike releasing on flat screen), but large studios with huge marketing budgets looking to make a ton of money can make more by selling flat screen games. Maybe they'd get some additional sales by releasing it for VR, but it's not guaranteed (hopefully it becomes more profitable to port to VR as the number of users increases though.)