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In my very limited experience, the main things I greatly enjoy in VR are:

  * social interaction
  * games that are improved by deep immersion, like horror games.
For social interaction, our tools are getting better every day. VRChat and its similars really are very, very good. A very real downside of it, though, is just how much money you need to spend to get "everything working".

At every stage, you'll want to spend more money on it, it feels like.

  * Get the headset on? The arms work, but the legs don't. 
  * Buy hip and leg trackers. Now it can't show what you're looking at - 
  * gotta buy eye-tracking, but eye-tracking is rare and only exists on like 2 headsets and their support is spotty at best. (Honestly, I think the PSVR2 would FLY off the shelves for a bit if they unlocked its best features for PC).
  * Buy face tracking, because people can't tell that you're grinning or making a face at them. - Oh, but that requires attaching something to your existing headset that might be custom or an additional fee because none of the headsets do this well by default.
  * buy a better computer to support all that
In the end, each of those steps is __several__ hundred dollars, and some of them require swapping out major parts of your machine for deeper and deeper immersion in the social world.



Which gets at the thing that bugs me about the article: “developers are focused on hard-core gamers” is not a root cause.

Why would a casual-game developer waste time on a VR effort, when the only people who already have the $1000+ worth of necessary VR equipment are the hardcore gamers. The “casual” crowd (i.e., people with other hobbies) would much rather upgrade their phone, or buy a new stand mixer for their kitchen, or go on a vacation, or whatever. They are specifically not going to go out and buy a expensive piece of equipment in order to try PokemonVR (in large enough numbers to matter), and when they do, it will sit unused for months at a time. You can't monetize a casual player who doesn't have the headset on long enough to want to buy in-game improvements to the experience.


> games that are improved by deep immersion, like horror games.

There are so, so many horror games. I really just want WoW on the quest - all of the MMORPG things are so clunky atm.

>I think the PSVR2 would FLY off the shelves for a bit if they unlocked its best features for PC

You are in luck for this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSVR/comments/15139hs/full_psvr2_he...

Edit: That's an old post, I was certain that the iVRy devs had unlocked eye tracking using their app, but I can't seem to find that post atm.




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