
Another Price Slash Suggests the Oculus Rift Is Dead in the Water - whiskers
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608257/another-price-slash-suggests-the-oculus-rift-is-dead-in-the-water/
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Sohcahtoa82
Kind of disappointed the article made no mention of the Vive.

Oculus is a PC product, PSVR is, well, obviously a PS4 product. I would think
Oculus's primary competitor is the Vive, another PC product. A quick Google
search leads to a lot of articles written in January claiming the Vive is
outselling Oculus 2-to-1.

Oculus's problem is that they buddied up with Facebook and then tried to
create a walled garden. Meanwhile, HTC buddied up with Steam, the de facto
home for PC gamers, to market the Vive. Oculus is also behind the curve. Vive
is room-scale and had motion controls from day 1.

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cr0sh
> Kind of disappointed the article made no mention of the Vive.

I'm always disappointed that no mention is ever made of Razer's OSVR HMD
(HDK):

[http://www.osvr.org/](http://www.osvr.org/)

Open-Source. Virtual Reality.

Instead we get closed source, walled garden, proprietary APIs - and of course,
virtually zero Linux support.

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shakna
HTC frequently send out Vive kits or new controllers like their tracker free.
(Though the full product is about $800).

Whereas Razer makes it difficult to find a price, but when you do, it's about
$400 for their devkit.

That aside, the huge difference is Steam's backing. Steam is where customers
go, and they only see Vive there. (Where Linux users are I'm afraid, quite a
small percentage. But, the Vive has decent support for Vulkan on Linux, and as
Vulkan becomes more and more the standard, it'll work better and better).

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Chardok
I honestly wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that it is
associated with Facebook.

Purely anecdotal, but in my gamer circles, seeing Facebook mentioned anywhere
near video games is met with repulsion. Blizzard's choice to have Facebook-
only live streaming means we would never use it (Yes Mom, I didn't call you
back because, as you can see, I played Overwatch for 8 hours). As soon as we
saw the announcement for Facebook taking over Oculus, we knew we weren't going
to purchase it solely for keeping Zuckerberg out of our video games.

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15charlimit
This. All of my old hardcore MMO buddies were pumped up during the Kickstarter
days and during the following development phase.

Once Oculus took FB's "dirty money" though, every single one of them saw the
writing on the wall, lost interest, and those with dev kits sold them off.

Gamers don't want social garbage getting in their way and pimping their
activity/habits/preferences out to advertisers. Oculus may not have had much
of a choice with their burn rate, but taking FB's money certainly didn't win
them any friends among the userbase they were targeting from day one.

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laughfactory
Same for all of us who just hate Facebook. I got off Facebook back in college
and now avoid it like the plague. When they bought Oculus my interest in it
died. No way am I using any app or product tied to Facebook in any way.

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RikNieu
I was really excited about VR but the price(and nausea/headaches) put me off
it.

I'm sure the price will continue to drop, as is par for the course in
technology, but the physical side effects..? I don't want to be like Richard
Hendricks and hug the porcelain after 30mins of gameplay.

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wilg
Physical symptoms in VR are a hardware (bad tracking) or software (too much
forced motion) problem.

Most games on Vive don't make me motion sick in the slightest, but games where
you're shooting around in a car or spaceship make me motion sick nearly
immediately.

Similarly, bad tracking (like on PSVR, or a Vive if there's a mirror in the
room) can make you motion sick just standing still.

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WorldMaker
Well, what an individual person can tolerate varies widely too. VR hardware
and software can't fix every problem with motion sickness just as we've yet to
fix every problem with motion sickness on moving vehicles (cars, planes,
boats), outside of blunt drugs (and their side effects).

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wilg
I guess what I meant is that with current technology VR should not make you
sick doing something that doesn't make you sick in real life.

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Vuudo
They should have done everything in their power to keep the Facebook brand
away from the Oculus brand, Vive fits in with the gamer / early adopter
culture, where as Oculus now fits in with..... mom and dad.... I guess?

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segmondy
Bought the dev kit, they never full developed the linux dev kit, then they
killed it. My dev kit is sitting collecting dust.

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perilunar
Similar. Bought the dev kit, then they killed OS X support.

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4rt
i bought the DK2 dev kit but never bothered with the 'consumer' version.

i genuinely believe that oculus never expected rift to be 'big' in any way, i
think it was about building up a VR game library ready for the next gen of
phone holders a-la samsung gear.

once phones are powerful enough to match a current mid-range gaming GPU and
can use cameras for low latency and high accuracy "inside-out tracking" (their
definition) without all the wires/lasers/sensorcameras facebook will be right
there with a store and a big library.

give it 5 years and VR might finally take off!

