I think the Web has many merits that make more sense for developers over using native game engines. People will reach for the Web when they want more distribution, when their app doesn't make sense on the game stores, need to publish instantly, update live, etc. And lot of content works better as a webpage that loads quickly versus a 1GB install (imagine an online VR store for Nike, or a teacher's quick VR render of an MRI).
For instance, we know people that have had their game rejected from the stores and are now looking at the Web. So the Web will always have its place.
I don't mean being in a store at all. When I went to the VR meetup near me no one was using the web to have any experience in VR at all. Not even game stores but advertisements that they setup themselves. The issue is the community is obsessed with performance and the only way they can do that is with native code. Also, no one will really be able to help you with your VR javascript app.
Yeah, WebVR is still very early, and VR has been all native so far. It would take a bit of time to catch into VR meetups. The 2D Web has lots of baggage from the 2D Web's performance related to the 2D layout engine.
Performance, while there are a few fixable issues with latency on the browser side, can be great on WebVR. WebGL has shown it can do quality 3D experiences as it's a wrapper on OpenGL.
The WebVR community itself though is pretty large. We maintain https://aframe.io (a WebVR framework) which has thousands of people in the Slack channels, and plenty of help on Stack Overflow. I also think the Web is a more accessible route to get into VR since it's just HTML/JS in a file.
I think the Web has many merits that make more sense for developers over using native game engines. People will reach for the Web when they want more distribution, when their app doesn't make sense on the game stores, need to publish instantly, update live, etc. And lot of content works better as a webpage that loads quickly versus a 1GB install (imagine an online VR store for Nike, or a teacher's quick VR render of an MRI).
For instance, we know people that have had their game rejected from the stores and are now looking at the Web. So the Web will always have its place.