Quest 3S Hands-on: Quest 2 Visuals with Quest 3 Power at an Unbeatable Price

Sorry, but your comment is insane—literally insane. To say that Valve isn’t innovative is to deny the history of video games. They have revolutionized the gaming industry multiple times, and this shows a lack of understanding among players. Valve is not just a gaming company; they’ve always been something beyond that. They only do something if it’s going to be revolutionary and bring something new—that’s their purpose. The same goes for VR; they’ve already shown what can be done with the technology. If we don’t have many games like Half-Life: Alyx, it’s solely our fault, the developers. We are incompetent. It’s not about Valve or anyone else; the issue is the lack of talent interested in VR. Most of the most talented people focus only on already established platforms.

You're a troll, I can't believe i fall into your bait.. Everything in life has a first time.

Yeah, never feed the troll.

Well, this has to be the most fanboy like comment I read in years!

"If we don’t have many games like Half-Life: Alyx, it’s solely our fault, the developers. We are incompetent."
Well, partly true, acknowledging that Valve really is not doing anything apart from Alyx. What has Valve done but bundle games into a UI? You honestly think this is more than 0.00001% of what Meta has contributed?

I did not say you are negative about Meta, but I feel you are unduly positive about Valve, together with Christian. Yes, they did great things early on, but lately have been rather inactive – just cashing in the money. Sure, that makes financial sense, it just does not deserve praise.

I'm all for changing our market economies driven by monetary gains to something more fair, where a single person doesn't end up earning or owning more than whole countries with millions of inhabitants, just because other people speculate on the stock market to turn their money into even more money.

But I'm not going to money-shame single figure billionaire Gabe Newell and act as if the contributions Valve made to gaming with Steam, and to VR with their early involvement, Index and HL:A, are any less valuable because Newell over 20 years got 1/20th as rich as Zuckerberg by giving gamers something they actually want.

And with Index controllers to my left, a Steam Deck sitting on the right side of my desk, and Valve attracting over 170K players with early Deadlock builds they release just last month, I don't think "lately has been rather inactive – just cashing in the money" is a fair evaluation. Just like Apple, but unlike Meta, Valve doesn't talk about unfinished projects, but occasionally then releases something great seemingly out of the blue.

Amen

As long as we can’t knock Alyx off the top of the VR best games list, we’ll still be behind, period.

Almost 400 game designers, developers, graphics and voice artists etc. worked on HL:A, 80 of them permanent Valve employees spending ~280 (wo)man years. If the other 320 invested only 10% as much, it adds to 392 years. In VR, only hybrid games like RE8 with 1500 credited had larger teams. AAA development is expensive.

Unless immortal, a single dev would die long before finishing even a small fraction of HL:A. Without huge budgets, only massive tool improvements will allow creating something similar in scope and quality. Maybe soon all that's needed is "Hey Siri/ChatGPT, make a VR game that's better than Half-Life: Alyx."

To ever knock Alyx off the top of the VR best games list requires finishing one first. For the sake of sanity I'd set the bar a bit lower, maybe "doesn't crash, fun to play, 4+ ratings on Quest, sells enough to survive", otherwise reality might adjust your expectations much more painfully. Undertale or Stardew Valley by single developers are probably more suitable role models than HL:A, and experiences gained will later help fixing whatever an AI hallucinated.

There is no "vr best games list". There is list of games actually played, and that spot has been taken by $20 gorilla tag on pcvr, and before that, it was all about slashing cubes in rtx4090 through beat saber.

TL;DR: Occasionally the VR community acts like a spoiled child buried by a huge pile of presents, asking "is that everything?"

I ask why didn't Lord Gaben give just a little of his vast mercy (money) to the developers to solve the VR chicken and egg situation all these years and establish a PCVR platform so talented people can have some hope to earn some bread?

Because it's not his job to finance you private hobby? Valve did lots of the basic development all consumer HMDs are based on. Valve's Michael Abrash, who came up with the infamous Valve room covered in optical markers, the room scale VR demo that convinced Zuckerberg to even buy Oculus, has now been the chief scientist at Oculus/MRL for the last decade. No Valve, no Meta Quest.

Palmer Luckey deserves credit for lots of tinkering and finding a way to create a very cheap PCVR HMD from standard parts that triggered a lot of what we have today, but Valve lay many of the foundations and most likely never made their money back. And even if Valve had dropped VR in 2014 after feeling betrayed by Oculus for taking the results of their cooperation, running towards Facebook for the money, using it to hire away their chief scientist and then opening a competing software store, we'd still owe them.

It's been 10 years since Oculus was bought by Zuck, and he has been pumping billions to grow VR.

I'm regularly astonished by the level of entitlement in VR. Instead of recognizing that we are extremely lucky that the power interests of a couple of tech giants cause so much market distortion that VR got pushed with billions it didn't earn and won't make back, people just assume that this is normal and demand more. News flash: it is not at all normal that every VR user has access to very expensive to develop hardware for a small fraction of the price that it would cost if this was a healthy market with companies relying on at least small profits instead of a trillion dollar company gamble.

– All the AAA studios should release VR games, despite AAA budgets so high that they would never make any money. Because they are somehow obliged to jumpstart the VR market.

– All the VR HMD manufacturers should release HMDs that are competitive to Quest, but offer extra features for not much more money. Despite Meta reports of losing billions at MRL. Because losing money -> ??? -> Profit!!!

– All the mobile HMDs should use Horizon OS, so current users can run the games they already paid for. Despite app sales being the remaining option to make money in a market flooded with Meta HMDs sold at production price, and Meta forcing all Horizon OS users onto their app store, funneling all the money towards them. Because this is a revolution, only traitors do it for the money.

– All VR developers should support the Quest 3 with updated graphics for the benefit of those who upgraded their hardware. Despite games usually sell the most in the first few weeks after launch, making it very hard to recoup later additions through new sales. Because "I already paid for it".

– All VR games should come with PC level graphics and extended campaigns, because if Red Matter 2 can do that for a very specific game design or Asgard's Wrath with tons of Meta money can do it, it can't be that hard. Despite most VR teams being very small as low game sales still make VR development a high risk with mostly financial failures. Because "get good".

VR Community: I want …
VR Companies: Okay, but are you willing to pay for it?
VR Community: That's not my problem, and you should be grateful for this opportunity, because future VR users will make you rich. It's not my job to figure this out, or my fault that you are too incompetent to grow the market to where you wouldn't lose money. Just give me my stuff.

Wow, you're a troll. You're a troll because you said something i dont agree with. Stop trolling.

TL;DR: more competition would be better; Steam's dominance causes people to massively overestimate how large Valve is, while their actual size makes their accomplishments even more impressive; Meta has one to two magnitudes larger income, staff, value, revenue, they can do a lot more

I agree that Valve's dominant role is far from ideal, and Valve introduced the 30% tax that Apple, Google and Meta simply copied because it was already "established". This might have been a reasonable amount in the beginning, because they had to build a lot of infrastructure, acquire new users and provide service from limited revenue. But over time these platforms get more automized and cheaper to run, with the operation costs spread over more users, so 30% to cover the cost after a few years turn into mostly direct profit these platforms make due to their almost monopolistic position.

I still give Valve a lot more credit, because their position is "earned" by service and user choice, while others enforce their monopoly through binding licenses. Epic used Fortnite money to open their own store and give out expensive presents, but people still stick to Steam, and not due to prices, but for the reviews, Steam workshop, achievements, friend lists and many small comfort features. There are still a ton of complaints about Steam, but of all the PC game stores, it is the least horrible one.

And regarding what Valve should give back to VR: Valve has 336 employees (2021), Meta 67K (2023), down from 86K (2022), so Meta is currently 200 times the size of Valve.
Meta generated USD134bn in revenue (2023), compared to est. USD 13bn total/USD 10bn from Steam from Valve (2022), so about ten times more. Fortnite alone generates about USD 5bn in revenue for Epic each year, Game pass is expected to do the same for Microsoft by 2025, up from USD 2bn a few years ago.

Revenue isn't earnings, so if Valve had absolutely no operational or other costs, Steam would generated USD 3bn from the 30% as profit. In reality they actually have to pay the 336 people, lots of contractors, offices, larger games pay less than 30%, and hosting and distribution tens of thousands of games also requires money. So Valve might have USD 1-2bn max per year they can actually spend for whatever, probably much less. Meta's net income for 2023 was USD 39.1bn, so at least 20-40 times more. And right now, Meta's market capitalization is USD 1,437bn, compared to est. USD 7.7bn value for Valve, making Meta 187 times more valuable.

No doubt Steam makes a lot of money for Valve and Gabe Newell, but Steam's dominance in PC gaming causes people to vastly overestimate how big or powerful the company is. Of those 336 employees, 35 are administration, 41 hardware developers, 79 work on Steam and 181 are developing and maintaining Valve's games. That is not a lot, and they rely heavily on contractors for many things. MRL alone had 10,000 people (30x Valve), all working on XR related subjects.

If you compare Valve and Meta by number of people and available resources, it is quite amazing that they had this level of impact on VR, released their own VR HMD, considered the best for a long time, a ground breaking VR game that is still considered state of the art and blueprint for VR interaction, with 393 people in the credits, so more people than Valve's whole staff. And more recently they shipped the Steam Deck to great reviews with excellent price performance ratio, also pushing gaming on Linux and most likely the base for an expected Deckard HMD that will arrive "soon in Valve time".

So while I share your concerns about missing competition, I think that the praise Valve gets is both earned, given the resources they have compared to much larger companies, and also necessary to point out to others how to do it right.