Comment by lolinder
3 years ago
No one is going to buy a $3500 headset for their puzzle and idle games, so Apple's existing games market is not going to help them sell this device.
For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.
Good point imo. In the Serious Gamer contingent, you’re perceived as being basically wheelchair-bound if you try to play any major title PC game on a Mac, regardless of its basic capability of running said game.
It’s similar to how many coders will scoff at someone running Windows, pointing out Mac’s higher quality ergonomics, nix OS, and overall friendliness to common dev tools. In recent years the gulf has closed a lot with Microsoft making solid gestures toward dev-ex, but the perception remains.
That said, Apple’s resistance to reaching out into the Serious Gamer market has always confused me, but as a Not Serious Gamer it’s very likely that I don’t really understand the engineering difficulties that they’d face in making those inroads (other than the fact that Mac products are seemingly modification-immune, and the Serious Gamer contingent avoids that mindset like cholera).
Did you not watch the keynote where they highlighted that Unity is a development partner?
I saw that but it doesn't help change my mind. A lot of fun PC games are made with Unity, but not the kind that really benefit from the immersion of VR [0]. Meanwhile, at the end of last year they merged with ironSource—a mobile ad platform—which suggests Unity continues to see their future as being focused on mobile and F2P.
It's possible that Apple will once again define the market, but choosing Unity is not good evidence they've correctly identified the VR games market that's already there.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-W...
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> For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.
I have no idea if Vision Pro will ultimately be successful, but I'd easily bet that game developers would be willing to come on board. Is there anyone that really disagrees that this is the most impressive piece of consumer VR tech to be released so far? Wouldn't game devs be chomping at the bit to put that technological power to use?
The current generation of VR has been around for a decade now and the large studios have been very anemic towards it so far.
And with Apple, that difficulty is compounded. The company’s greatest success with games has been the casual mobile market, mostly with indie devs and indie studios. Apple and AAA don’t really gel.
I worked at a games company that only made casual games and we had individual users who spent more that $3500 per month, admittedly not many, but more than one.
I'm not saying that casual gamers don't have the cash, I'm saying that casual games almost by definition won't benefit from an immersive experience. People aren't going to go out and spend $3500 to play Candy Crush in the air. Well, not enough to make this device take off.
Those casual games are addiction machines, that are effectively casino games without payouts. The folks paying that much have addictions.
Relatively few folks will spend $3500 on a device unless they think they're going to use it frequently.