CCP to Shelve VR as It Shutters Atlanta Office, Sells Branch Behind ‘EVE: Valkryie’ in Newcastle

Yeah man, I’ve gotta agree with that. FB’s involvement is a boon all the way around, if nothing else because they’re helping things get off the ground. I see this all much like the early PC era, back when IBM, Compaq, and a few others had to take a lot of chances and sometimes take a hit to their profit just to push forward into another year of improvements to R&D and final products. In the end, it seems to have paid off, but it was a nearly 4 decade long process to get from there to here. I don’t expect VR to take nearly as long to mature, but I also don’t think it’s just going to happen in the first generation of decent, consumer priced hardware.

The biggest problem as I see it, really, is a matter of “The Matrix Effect”. The public at large, when they think of VR, tend to jump straight to the Matrix films as their go-to reference for what they think VR should be like. Meanwhile, you also have a great number of early adopters that were gamers back in the 1980s, grew up with films like Lawnmower Man, and knew fully well that it would take decades for VR to develop, but that once it finally arrived in a consumer friendly form, it’d be a hit with seasoned gamers long before it’d go mainstream. Meanwhile, we have a huge number of people, both inside the industry and out, that are trying to push VR as a mainstream entertainment technology long before the public at large are ready for that as a whole.

The greater majority of people that have reported simulator sickness effects have been casual gamers and gamers that don’t play a large amount of games that use fast 360-degree/6-DoF environments; But every single person I’ve talked with that was also a player of the Descent series (and games of that type) are also having an absolute blast with VR because they’re experiencing no ill effects at all. At the same time, many of this particular lot also grew up alongside video games and understand that sometimes in order to move forward, you have to take a step or two backward –just ask any hardcore PC gamer what they thought about the industry push a few years back to get everyone on mobile, meanwhile trying to tell all of us that PC gaming was going the way of the dinosaurs… which didn’t happen… and instead lead to VR finally reaching consumer product state at a price that’s sub-$2000 for a complete working system, regardless of platform. Compared to 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, that’s a steal. When I first priced VR hardware many years ago, the HMD alone that I wanted at that time had a prices starting at $18000, and this was before adding in the system to run it on –on top of that, the HMD looked like something an Apache pilot would wear during a combat op –but go figure why that was… it was co-developed by DARPA for use in early military experimentation with VR, over a decade before cutting edge hospitals began using VR for things such as molecular modelling.

I think it’ll be a more interesting discussion in about 10 years when we look back on the late 20-teens, and how awkward the launch of the VR industry was, during a time when no one knew what to do with it, didn’t know what consumers wanted from it, and when consumer expectations exceeded what could be technologically delivered. I tend to believe that all of the growing pains we’re seeing now will be somewhere around where any mature entertainment medium’s are at that point. Early TV and Radio had their own awkward phase, as did film, theater, and in more recent times, arcade games leading to home video games and PCs going from being primarily work tools to being some of the most powerful gaming platforms ever designed. VR will mature in time, but I’m happy to be part of it’s early development, and more so to be involved in so many beta testing projects right now related to VR –because VR has lead to more active development across more platforms than I think I’ve ever seen in my 45 years of living.