The case with VR and Gaming
Virtual Reality is the next big thing…or is it?
The history of gaming innovation has always been about delivering that immersive experience through any medium whether it’s using audio or visual effects to make the end-user feel like “they are inside the game” while playing.
This goal in innovation has led us to products, many off which may come before their time, or have ended up as failed gimmicks by developers that help augment the gaming experience by trying to mix virtual and physical realities in many forms, an early example would be the Power Glove, which was manufactured by Nintendo during 1989, which aimed to upgrade the gaming experience by allowing hand gestures as control inputs rather than the use of the traditional controller.
Although it had a noble cause, the Power Glove was limited by the technology of its time and was not able to live up to what it aimed to be, and, sadly, after staying in stores for a year, it ended up being a commercial failure, and would go down in history as one of the worst gaming-related products to ever hit the market.
While the Power Glove is considered a failure commercially, it is without a doubt an early example of how gaming developers tried to up the ante of the gaming experience, first by the utilization of physical gestures, which then led to other forms of immersive gaming add-ons, such as the EyeToy, which was made for the PlayStation 2, which then paved way for the PlayStation Move, and its Xbox equivalent, the Kinect.
Now as motion and gesture has started us on the path of mixing or augmenting gaming experiences it is without a doubt that further innovation will arrive over the years and fast forward from to 2012, the world was made known of the future of gaming innovation that was Virtual Reality through he form of the Oculus Rift.
It is without a doubt that the Oculus Rift, which was initially unveiled through a Kickstarter campaign, has raised a higher bar for immersive gaming experience, this time, by combining visual, and auditory senses with motion to make us feel that we are actually inside the game, once a fictional fantasy, now made into reality, and had everyone jumping on the hype train will multiple developers, whether independent or established keeping a close eye to how the market will perceive the product. There was so much promise on the Oculus Rift that even Mark Zuckerberg, and his Social Media empire, Facebook, jumped on the train and took over the Oculus funding, helping ensure that the device would see the light of day.
Just years after the Oculus Rift was unveiled, 2 big tech companies, HTC and Valve, unveiled a joint project of their own for Virtual Reality, and gave us the HTC Vive, a more updated Virtual Reality headset, which, in contrast to what the Oculus Rift initially offered, further expands the immersive gaming experience into the Room-level, making the end-user actually move around and tinker around a specified simulated area as if they were in the real world, it can be remembered that while the Oculus Rift did offer visual, auditory, and to some extent, motion for the immersive experience, a huge chunk of what it had to offer was limited to sitting in front of your gaming console, putting on the VR headset and using controllers to control your character in-game while your head motions control the in-game camera, still with the arrival of the Vive, the Rift was able to catch up and update the immersive experience that they are offering to the level that the HTC and Valve has initially offered.
As both companies have been playing the Tug-of-War in VR, becoming the budding industry’s major players, and while both have also encouraged other companies such as Microsoft to join the hardware Virtual Reality race, the supposed next frontier in gaming has witnessed a few major hurdles, which are still unaddressed up to this day, and has ended the tech still being referred to as the “next frontier in gaming” even though it’s already half-a-decade since it was first made known into the world.
The most common of issues with Virtual Reality gaming revolves around the pricing of the devices itself which can total up to USD 800, on the headgear and the initial peripherals alone, and that doesn’t count the upfront costs of building your Virtual Reality-ready PC platform, which commonly would have to compose of the latest in hardware, which adds roughly up to USD 600 to the budget, and that’s just considered as the most affordable.
While many would say that the issue with pricing is to be expected knowing the level of technology that the Virtual Reality head gears are utilizing, it has been a dangerous affair, especially since it was not what the community initially expected, that after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey initially quoted an expected price ceiling that sits around the “USD 350 ballpark”. The actual price reveal significantly dashed the hopes of many expectant buyers and even developers, many of which are independent and have invested time and money into the VR tech hoping that they can capitalize on the new trend. To quote an example of how much the gaming population wants Virtual Reality after having significant information such as the pricing, a 2016 study by Newzoo revealed that only 12% of gamers in the USA would want to get their hands on VR gear, whereas the UK only tallied 10%, to give you more perspective on those numbers, both the USA and UK are in the top 5 highest grossing countries in the global gaming market, with the USA having an online population of 326,475,000, whereas UK sits at 65,512,000.
However, while pricing still continues to be a problem for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, with both costing USD 799.99 and USD 598 respectively, Microsoft’s new Virtual Reality initiative might help make the prices more competitive for the Windows 10 VR gear is revealed to only bear a USD 299 price tag, its performance however is still to be assessed as Microsoft is yet to roll out the development kits on a major scale.
In addition to the case with the pricing, Virtual Reality for major platforms has also suffered another issue and that pertains to the number of actual full games, not experiences that it offers should anyone be willing to invest in it. Now in contrast to full fledged games that offer hours of content and gameplay, Virtual Reality titles can last for up to 2 hours at most, and that excludes the mini experiences that give you 15–30 minutes of content. Although it is still debatable if a VR experience should go beyond 2 hours given the complexity of the hardware and the fact that the end-user is practically wearing the device in their heads and that they rather weigh considerably and may result in unpleasant effects such as nausea,it is still interesting to note that there hasn’t been any major news concerning any major developer or publisher investing a major push with VR, in fact, given the recent release of the PS4 Pro and the upcoming Xbox Project Scorpio, it is evident that the developers, and even the community, are more keen towards the upgraded visual experience that high definition graphics and display can offer, thus resulting in the major push towards 4K Gaming rather than VR gaming.
As Virtual Reality’s journey in the gaming industry continues to see more lows than highs, the rapid growth of technological innovation may help revisit and assess these problems in the very near future, and will hopefully grant us the promise of VR Gaming that we all deserve. One solution would be for major players to work together in order to cut down production costs which in turn would then drop the prices down, to re-spark consumer interests in obtaining the product, and result in more developers investing in the technology.
While Virtual Reality did take long years before arriving to what it is today, it might not take very long before it becomes the trend again, and will hopefully really become the next conquered frontier in Video Game entertainment.
