This is why Best Buy is ditching the Oculus demos
It’s really easy to assemble a string of unrelated events and make them look like a trend, and last week we saw many impressive examples of this. Hot on the heels of a Business Insider scoop revealing Best Buy was shutting down 200 Oculus Rift demo stations, hot takes from around the globe leaned in to a particularly destructive narrative regarding the future of VR.
You see, Oculus Rift sales from last year weren’t anywhere near the original projections. In fact, no VR company shipping hardware last year managed to reach their projected sales goals, but Oculus is viewed as the industry leader so that was especially significant. Those meager sales figures were followed almost immediately by losing part of a very expensive court battle against ZeniMax. When you add the Best Buy news to that financial gut punch, and twist the typical pre-GDC and pre-E3 release slump as “no new games are coming out” it’s not hard to paint a picture of the VR industry spiraling into obscurity.
As is all too often the case with this sort of thing, there’s a lot more going on. For example, the Best Buy decision has way more to do with how these demo stations are set up and what Oculus needs to do in order to present VR to new consumers.
Here’s one of the Oculus Rift demo stations in my local Best Buy. It’s on an end cap in the center aisle of the store, one of the main traffic areas in this store. It’s got a looping video with a bunch of cool VR games on display, and a display case with all of the relevant hardware. There’s no audio for this looping video, but it’s here for everyone to see as they walk into the store.
The layout for this store places this end cap outside of the PC, Gaming, and Entertainment zones of the store. The people that would have been trained to answer questions about this experience aren’t ever going to walk up to someone standing at this end cap and offer to answer questions or render assistance in any way. The two Blue Shirts you see in this photo? They had no idea how to help me when I started asking questions. No offers to demo this hardware, not even an attempt to see if I already had a capable PC in an attempt to upsell me .One of them was only trained on mobile hardware, and the other straight up told me to wait for Xbox VR and not bother with this.
When I finally got someone to acknowledge that I wanted to try this out, I got told to schedule a demo online. Here’s what that looks like.
There are no demos available during the week for this store! These end caps sit and do nothing but play that looped video for 5 of the 7 days out of the week people are walking past this display, and very few people in the store even know how this demo environment even works. Even if you book a demo and wait patiently to go check Rift out, here’s what you get in this store.
Oculus recommends a 5ft by 7ft space for playing Oculus Touch games. That giant row of television boxes is not only in the way of gameplay, it creates a space where other shoppers try to sneak by while you’re playing. When a crowd forms as someone is playing, they get as close as they can in order to see the gameplay on the tiny monitor embedded into the end cap. In some cases, Best Buy staff will set up safety lines if they anticipate a larger crowd, but only after people arrive and it is perceived as a problem.
The only really great thing Oculus did with this display is mount the Constellation Cameras into the back of the display, all but totally hidden from view.
As you can see, there’s little to this experience that directly encourages random people to walk up and experience Oculus Rift. When you compare this experience to other VR offerings in the same store, it’s not hard to see why these demo stations are viewed as under-performing.
These Oculus demo stations, at least in their current configuration, aren’t great for every store.
The Samsung area right across from this Rift end cap has two Gear VR stations where anyone can pick the headset up and start exploring. The Samsung employees are trained to help people find cool demos in the headsets and explain how it all works.
The PlayStation VR demo areas are temporary setups inside the gaming area of the store. It’s a larger display on a larger television, and people walking by and watching can actually hear what the person playing the game can hear. There’s a line to try this experience every time it is set up, which is multiple times every week in this store.
If the goal of these demo stations is to get people that aren’t already excited about VR a better way to understand what is being experienced, there’s a lot here that could be done better. These Oculus demo stations, at least in their current configuration, aren’t great for every store. A more open solution, one that encourages people to stop and stare and ask questions is much better. The people making decisions at Best Buy have seen other examples of these VR demos working well in stores, and now it’s up to Oculus to figure out how to tweak their existing plans to offer a better experience.
