Comment by jfoster
4 days ago
Meta essentially made a sequel to Second Life.
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
4 days ago
Meta essentially made a sequel to Second Life.
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
Zuck never seemed to actually articulate how this was any different or newer than a sterile corporate vr version of second life. Then VRChat got big and seemed to be better than Horizon Worlds for... everything.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Zuck just goes 'all in' on every hype and blows billions, because he doesnt want to miss out on anything. What is a few 10s of billions here and there for a company with a money printer.
Seems like maybe that mindset is where he won the hands of cards that turned into the money printer… so he just understands portfolio theory?
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VR will probably always be pretty niche for gaming. Even with affordable headsets, there is still a lot of friction to their daily usage that limits their appeal
- VR sickness
- Lack of physical space in people's homes
- Don't really work as a shared experience without multiple headsets
On top of that, this company in particular is Facebook. Nobody likes Facebook.
I am one of those people who love VR gaming done well. There is a game called Super Rumble built by what I think is a subsidiary of Meta. It's a very well executed arena FPS concept. There are just a couple dozen people in the world who are really skilled and play enough for me to recognize them and be glad they're playing when I'm also online. It's magical when there are good people on this thing playing together.
I hope it's something we can figure out how to propagate despite the seemingly limited interest. I suspect anyone who liked playing quake arena games would love this game if they are not susceptible to motion sickness.
I recently started exploring how to port open source shooters (red eclipse, warsow, nexuiz) to the platform and realized there are several considerations that make games designed for VR special that a pure port wouldn't hit.
I think VR gaming can easily grow 10x - 100x by having cheaper, better fidelity, less bulky hardware and a better games library.
I bet plenty of gamers haven't bought their first headset yet despite being interested.
You're not wrong, but it also seems the most plausible use of VR for now. Those shortcomings also apply to Horizon Worlds.
It seems like there really isn't much of a market for VR gaming, though. It would have failed just as miserably.
Not only because of hardware costs, but not everybody can play them for extended periods of time and 'the youth' are increasingly preferring to look at social media over playing games.
I don't think it's anywhere near peaking yet.
It's probably already far more popular than the 3DTV of the 2010s.