The price points for games always seemed very high to me. In an ideal world they'd offer a "no ads, full price" version and a "discount with ads" version. My guess is we'll probably just be left with "full price with ads" as the only option.
How is $20 high? I'm continually amazed how much fun a $20 game can provide.
For the price of a movie ticket and a coke, you can get a dozen hours of entertainment. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.
And the $60 are AAA games where you'd easily get 30-40 hours worth. These have budgets of ~$70 million; they have to make their money back somehow.
One of the secondary reasons I've avoided Oculus is that it is a closed system; you can only buy from a single provider. You're much more likely to find sales on VR games on Steam.
Video games on Steam are the best ROI for entertainment period, right up there with a good pair of hiking boots.
> For the price of a movie ticket and a coke, you can get a dozen hours of entertainment. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Or maybe the movie ticket with overpriced coke is just a bad deal?
A lot of it is also pretty relative down to a personal level and preferences: Some people can entertain themselves with a deck of cards, not even worth $1, for a nearly unlimited amount of time.
Think about entertainment options and name one that is a better deal than $60 for 20 hours worth. It's just not common, perhaps outside of books. Life is expensive and publicly available entertainment is far from an exception.
A 20$ VR game is usually (if it is linear) about 3-6 hours long.
"Superhot VR" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 6 hours.
"Star wars: Tales from the galaxy's edge" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 4 hours.
I think the longest single player VR game that exists now is "The Walking dead: saints & sinners" (40$) which is around 11-14 hours long, but it is barely linear, it is more like a fallout/far cry game but with far less interesting locations. Completionist have played it for 30 hours in total.
Be careful. By putting a lot of emphasis on length, you'll end up with ubisoft games, where 80% of it is filler content to get to the 100 hour completion time and only about 20% are actually fun and worthwhile. (I'm overexaggerating but you get the idea).
What rank? I've felt a huge difference in competition at 2500+. 10k to 5k wasn't bad, but the moment 2500-3000 and consistent 300pp plays just to maintain it hit I felt the burn.
I don't grind PP, Never got into that scene. I've just been working on songs, and as it stands I can't crack Expert+ Ghost, Light it up, and Spin Eternally. That seems to be my limit.
If you like action sci-fi RPG, I'd recommend Space Pirates and Zombies 2. I played the whole thing in its optional sit-down VR. One non-completionist run through took me about 30 hours.
Asgard's Wrath took me about 40 hours for my first play through. And the internet seems to suggest about 29 hours just for the main story and up to 80 hours for the completionist
Steam sales aren't what they used to be. Once they added refunds the sales got watered down, because you could just refund and re-buy if the price got lower at a later date in the sale.
There's also a ton of free/discounted games on the Epic store, 3rd party key resellers, and subscriptions like Xbox Gamepass. These are all possible because the PC remains an open, competitive platform - so that point stands.
The micro transaction and "pay to not wait" model is just an overall terrible experience. Mobile gaming has solidified itself as watching a series of software timers count down.
Yeah, it's sad. I would like to play mobile games, but every time I check it out it's the same thing. There's an initial cool gameplay idea that's fun for ~1 hour that is then stretched into eternity, which makes it ultimately unsatisfying.
There isn't any point chasing customers like yourself. If it was even $10-$20 you'd probably be saying it should be $5, if it was $5 you'd say it should be 0.99c
We've seen this all before with the iOS App Store and the end game is just everything free with intrusive ads.
That's not a customer problem. That's a platform problem. On a platform where ads are allowed developers stop being developers and start being eyeball farmers and their products suffer for it.
The point in chasing customers like me is that I won't watch ads, but I will spend money, even $20+ for an iOS game. Streaming services have figured this out and offer ad-free versions. Some iOS developers will allow you to pay for a game to remove ads. (The problem on iOS is there is no easy way to determine which games are like this, or to filter based on things like this in search.)
>> The price points for games always seemed very high to me. In an ideal world they'd offer a "no ads, full price" version and a "discount with ads" version.
How do you go into a shared VR environment and have ads appear for one user and not another?
I'm on-board with "just make everyone pay for apps" but it's very hard to decide what's going to be worth $30. My favorite VR game is free, but I went ahead and paid for the optional content (non functional) because I want to support the developers.
I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now. The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years? One additional problem is that everybody wants to cash in on subscriptions and micro transactions for continuous money, even when you’ve already paid “full” price.
> I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now.
But that’s only one half of the story. The other is how tools, assets, hardware, knowledge and training have become much more affordable, streamlined and widespread.
What used to be a somewhat niche industry with barely any formal entry ways, is now a massively formalized industry dwarfing even Hollywood.
Just the publishing side alone saw a massive falling of gates with the emergence of the indie scene. IMHO there are very real economies of scale effects to this.
I don't know if I agree with this. Not that you're wrong but I don't think it's the full picture.
15 years ago games were still largely physical. That $60 included the physical games, cases, manuals, distribution, warehousing, etc. These days everything being digital companies don't have to pay that anymore. Sure there's a commission you have to pay on Steam/EGS but I highly doubt it's close to what having a physical distribution method cost.
So the way the $60 pie is split up today is totally different, and I imagine a much, much larger portion of that goes to the developers.
> The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years?
Not really. $60 is an introductory price, but most games at that price launch with at least one $80+ special edition and are supplemented with $40+ of post-launch content with much higher margins than the original game. And that's before considering some of the more contentious monetization practices like micro-transactions and "loot boxes". In many cases devs and publishers slash the initial price of a game shortly after launch (usually a year or two) to increase player counts, because more players generally means more sales of post-launch content.
And that's something else nobody ever seems to bring up when discussing the stagnant price of video games - the ever-increasing sales volumes. The cost of producing additional copies of a game is negligible, especially with the rise of digital distribution, so each copy sold after breaking even is pure profit. Since there is basically no production cost, developers (in theory, at least) dump part of their profit into the development of their next title. This allows them to stay competitive and results in skyrocketing budgets. The high budgets are a sign of a successful industry, not a struggling one.
Despite the increasing budgets and seemingly stagnant launch prices, video game developers are more profitable than ever. It's because they are selling more copies than ever and have figured out plenty of ways to bring in extra revenue after the initial sale. If you ask me, things should go the opposite direction. A huge selection of cheap, high-quality indie titles have affected the relative value of "AAA" titles, to the point where I rarely consider spending full price on a game launched at $60. Either way, the industry has recently been dipping its toes in the water with a new $70 shelf price. We'll see if it sticks.
Of also used to be entirely up to content creators whether or not there were ads on their YouTube videos. We know how that went. Companies dependent on ads for the majority of their profit can't help themselves. What is one more ad? See Facebook's changes to ads on Instagram for an idea of what will happen on Oculus
It’s not just you, but you are a tiny minority. You’ve expressed a sentiment that’s very popular on HN, but not among the general population. Take YouTube - a popular ad supported service with a premium tier. How many people are willing to pay to remove ads? Less than 1%. Even on HN I don’t think that number would be more than 10%.
>Take YouTube - a popular ad supported service with a premium tier. How many people are willing to pay to remove ads? Less than 1%.
I think that's an inaccurate assessment of 'people who don't want to see ads', given that statistics put internet wide usage of ad-blockers at around 42%.[0].
Maybe it's just that no one wants to pay their captors for golden ear-muffs and blinders when they themselves are the ones responsible for the poor user experience.
> Maybe it's just that no one wants to pay their captors for golden ear-muffs and blinders when they themselves are the ones responsible for the poor user experience.
I vehemently refuse to pay for YouTube Premium for that exact reason. I get ads that amount to something like "You know how we just stuff ads down your eyeballs constantly? You know how it's really annoying? For just X.99 a month, we'll no longer do that!"
These enrage me to the core. Now that I have NewPipe and other methods of watching YouTube without ads and artificially freezing the stream when I switch away from the app, the official app is useless.
I don't understand this. Would it be better if YouTube "Free" didn't even exist? No one's forcing anyone to use youtube. How is this different from any subscription service that has a hobbled "lite" version?
YouTube doesn't provide the content, the people I watch do. I send them money. A youtube subscription to them, of which youtube takes a cut, doesn't disable ads -- only a second service, paid to youtube itself, does. Apparently $15/mo gets rid of ads, but $5.99 a month (less 20%, thanks youtube) actually creates the content I care about watching. Youtube has inserted themselves in the middle, and are extracting rent from both sides.
Precisely. I want to compensate content creators for their content, and YouTube for their bandwidth, discovery and video storage with some markup on top. YouTube wants too much for what they do.
It's the sheer aggression in their advertising that they introduced recently. There are memes that you have 2 ads every video, and that is closer to reality than parody these days.
My touchstone for excessive advertising is a Polish TV station called Polsat, which often had very good programming but also lots and lots of ads. We often joked that Polsat programming was "all ads, sometimes broken up by a few minutes of actual TV". It wasn't quite that bad, but it was true that you would get just under ~10 minutes of adverts per every 15-25 minutes of programming.
YouTube exceeds that ratio, these days. And when that happens, I'm almost positive it's time to start packing your toys and looking for a different source of entertainment.
No one's forcing YouTube to send me the videos either. If it gives me ads, they will be deleted before they even make it to my screen. If they don't like that, they are free to return 402 Payment Required instead of giving me stuff for free.
>> I think that's an inaccurate assessment of 'people who don't want to see ads'
They made a statement about people who are willing to PAY not to see ads. People don't want to pay for anything. Give me free content! And then when they don't like the ads - give me a free ad-blocker!
For me, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price for most things as long as I'm convinced I'll like it. But that's a problem with most content - uncertainty.
No, everyone agrees that ads are annoying. I install uBlock Origin on every single browser I come across. Every single time, people take notice almost immediately. They always tell me the internet just feels so much nicer. Many times they can't explain why, they just know.
Ads are a blight on the modern web. Everyone prefers the low-noise version.
Not in my experience. People usually just ignore annoying stuff. They don't even read anything, it barely registers on their minds. I've seen people browsing a website get extremely confused when some newsletter bullshit pops up in front of the content. They immediately start searching for a close button to get rid of it. They assume annoyances like that are an inevitable part of life on the internet.
With uBlock Origin we can show them a better world.
You're oversimplifying, because the question isn't about paying to remove ads vs not paying and seeing ads, but about paying and getting the product or not paying and not getting the product.
People's behavior depends on the circumstances they are given, and if "free (with ads)" is one choice, then indeed a lot of people will choose it over paying. However, if option is not given, it doesn't mean everyone who would've picked free are not going to pay at all.
There are some highly popular freemium/ad supported games but also lots of very popular games that you simply must pay for. Applying the 1% number from products where the choice is ad-free-or-paid to must-pay-for games and assuming they'd get 99x more users if given for free with ads is just completely wrong.
In general, people seem quite willing to pay for games (this may be less true in mobile, that's a rather different market). The challenge isn't that people don't want to pay, it's that the market is extremely saturated and it's hard to stand out from the crowd & produce a game that everyone wants to play over all the other choices.
My biggest bugbear with youtube premium is that there's very little way to control your youtube recommendations other than being in incognito / a new browser session.
I constantly find that youtube's algorithm just recommends me less interesting stuff over time. If I could have some decent controls on it, paying for an ad free experience would be worthwhile.
> How many people are willing to pay to remove ads?
For me, I'd rather not watch Youtube at all if I have to pay to use it. I have found that it is an incredible time-waster and really adds very little value to my life. If I had the self control I would stop using it on my own.
I’m getting close to paying, YouTube has figured out some clever way to keep AdGuard on iOS from properly blocking ads and it’s super annoying. But I mean when it’s trivial for a technical user to download a few adblockers why pay, right?
That is one of the reasons I love using a real computer. I can install firefox with ublock origin and sponsorblock. Bomm. No more ads, no more tracking and no more in-video ads.
I would only get the first by paying, and I have found videos without ads so more more relaxing.
I get what you're saying, but honestly the Quest is in a whole other league, as a product. I had an original Vive, and understand that Cosmos has higher fidelity etc, but the Quest inside-out-tracking is good enough, and can be used with or without a PC, with or without a cable to said PC, the resolution is great, and the compression on the PC interfaces while noticable is, again, good enough.
I sincerely don't miss the lighthouses and cables, and can make a new area in any part of the house, at any time.
I just wish it wasn't owned by Facebook. But there's no competitor, unfortunately.
I understand where you're coming from and ignoring the Facebook aspect the Quest would perhaps be the product for me, though I can't say I see much of an advantage of it over my current system.
Cosmos also has inside out tracking so no beacons and I honestly don't mind the cables. I never really notice them when I play. I did with the original Vive when I tried it at work, though. As for the PC, I'm an avid gamer and graphics programmer for a AAA studio. My VR is set up in my home office so I have access to a more than adequate PC, anyway.
What I really do mind is a lack of graphical fidelity. Cosmos was the first option I tried which really felt good enough for me (the original Vive always felt cool but not quite there) and I know Quest has very similar resolution. But noticeable compression artifacts sound like something that would really bother me.
Support the companies that offer this an encourage others to do the same - I worry about a future where VR is monopolized by Facebook and held there by network effect
> I worry about a future where VR is monopolized by Facebook and held there by network effect
That's why it's awesome that Valve is so heavily invested in VR to counter that. They might not have more money than Facebook, but they have more than enough to compete with them. Plus, they have the expertise in video games that Facebook doesn't.
It's just a shame that Valve is by all accounts a highly dysfunctional company.
The problem any competitor will have fighting FB is entry price -- FB is the only player right now that sells a standalone unit and that unit is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, headset on the market with a $300 MSRP. Everyone else is far more expensive and requires a PC with a discrete GPU (or game console, in the case of the PlayStation VR), so the total cost of entry ends up being far higher.
What Valve is doing with the Index is really cool, but they're still operating as if they're trying to sell to VR enthusiasts, while Facebook is cornering the market by trying to sell to the general public.
> The problem any competitor will have fighting FB is entry price
I don't think that's true. The main problem right now is that VR is still (even after all these years) an unproven/experimental consumer product.
It's like buying a game console in the 70s-80s compared to buying one today. Back then, video games were still largely experimental and you were more likely to get garbage than gold. Today, designers know what works/doesn't work, and consumers can be confident in their purchases.
VR is not like that yet. A "VR Game" is still a vague and uncertain term, and consumers can't have confidence in it yet. There are some great VR experiences out there, but there are many many more garbage ones.
I think that a company focusing on finding a good fit for VR is going to be better off long-term than one just trying to corner this early market.
Example: If Valve figures out the "secret sauce" for VR games (much like Nintendo did in the early console wars), it's not going to matter how cheap Facebook's headsets are. People (including Oculus owners) will flock to Steam for the superior experiences while Facebook scrambles to make clones. With a failed "platform", Facebook will ultimately lose.
If anything, Facebook's investments to flood the market with cheap headsets (possibly even subsidizing them) could end up helping Valve in the long term, since it just means more potential Steam customers, and it gives Valve the opportunity to experiment with the high-end stuff without worrying about the market completely dying in the meantime.
It's absolutely not just you. Those people would put ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. We need to actively fight against this by somehow blocking all these ads with no exceptions. Drive their return on investment as close to zero as possible.
Yeah, I don’t mind it. Realistically I need almost nothing but yet I buy a lot of things. Probably got “tricked” a few times but don’t particularly care.
I too like to buy things, but interrupting me to offer me things I might like is really wasteful. Allow me to submit things I want to buy and then let companies suggest things based on that.
But I don't like seeing the same ad over and over again. I don't like seeing ads of stuff that I've already bought and I especially don't like to watch a commercial for the thousandth time for a video I'm not sure even is worth watching.
Oculus was an excellent product and the Quest was surprisingly successful but weirdly Facebook is being way too aggressive with trying to make the platform profitable like a traditional FB product before it's fully entrenched.
Think this might eventually be their downfall, if Sony could ship a stand alone headset at Quest quality they'd probably be able to eat FB's lunch at this point because the push to force you to use an FB account and now pushing ads into it are making it far less appealing.
Really they should have just let it fly for a few more years like how they allowed Instagram to be Instagram for a few years before they ruined it with ads and algorithms gradually.
I think if VR had the same adoption curve that Facebook initially enjoyed, we would be able to wait longer for the inevitable ad push. Anecdotally speaking, I haven't seen VR "take off" like people online hope it will year after year. Seems likely that the VR market has quite some pressure on it to turn profits soon before it bleeds out.
There is still no competitor for the standalone headset (Quest) which seems to be a more likely candidate for mass adoption. I own all of the (Oculus, HTC, Valve, several models for each) and I can tell you that convenience seems like the key more that quality of graphics.
That's like saying you can't compare a top of the line MacBook to a $300 HP laptop. The Pro 2 hardware specs are significantly better than the Oculus and the price isn't being subsidized in exchange for feeding your data into Facebook.
When Facebook bought them, I remember part of the delusional gaming crowd saying crap like "no don't worry guys, FB will respect the Oculus, they won't ruin it! FB login? They won't require it! Ads? No they won't!"
I remember they put out a statement saying it would never require a FB login, and that you were ridiculous to suggest it would ever have ads.
Had an oculus rift DK1 at the time - deleted my accounts, unsubscribed from everything, and bought an HTC vive shortly after it came out. Wasn't buying that at the time, and I feel vindicated now.
I don't think they ever put out a formal statement (I'd love to be corrected on this). What I do remember is Palmer Luckey saying that, but then, it's really on the Oculus community to have believed the words of a 22 year old about to make millions.
Facebook kept the promise(in airbquotes) though. Whoever behind Palmer’s Reddit account said he _personally_ assure that _Rift_ remains usable forever without an account, IIRC.
The Vive Pro 2 is a new headset and probably the best on the market. Compatible with the rest of the index hardware. I'm holding out hope for an index 2 sometime in 2022 personally.
Oculus Quest is the least expensive, competitive, standalone headset. Least expensive option often pairs with ad-supported.
We bought a Quest before Facebook bought Oculus, and we're very disappointed with that turn of events. I think most people would be better off opting out of VR until there's a non-Facebook standalone headset under $400 (like the original Quest once was.)
EDIT: Correction - we did not buy the Quest before it existed. We bought it a bit before the announcement that you'd eventually need to use a Facebook account with it.
I don't think the Quest existed before the Facebook purchase. The Quest was announced in 2018 but Facebook made the purchase in 2014. Unless you mean before the Facebook login was forced upon Oculus users.
Well damn. That flew under my radar. Or I put up some mental blocks because our family really wanted one while some from the older generation could still experience it.
Now that I think back, I think we knew that, but it was still an "Oculus" account at the time, before the "Facebook account" requirement was announced. That seems to have been announced August of 2020... just weeks after we bought our Quest.
Honestly I didn't think the purchase was until like, 2017. I'm just as surprised. It kills me that Facebook owns the entry level and stand alone market as well (said as an Index owner).
(in response to the edit) I can see that, my first VR headset was the CV1 Rift and my logic at the time was similar. Sure Facebook owned it but everything seemed to be still fairly separated. None of what happened after was particularly surprising.
Hopefully some Chinese company will manufacture a similar system somewhat compatible with android. WebXR exists however that is probably not as performant however.
That only works for someone belongs to hard anti-Facebook cluster like I am. The situation is similar to hobby drones, the alternatives to problematic ones are years behind for higher prices.
Do you really think that data from the VR headset is worth $300 (or more)? I'm skeptical that it's worth that much unless they are jacked in every waking moment.
> They aren't years behind but are more expensive since they arne't being subsidized to eat up your data.
They are years behind. FB now has a significant patent library advantage, and nobody is even making standalone headsets with a strong software library.
A little off-topic - does anyone know why Steam takes screenshots of VR content played in a headset? I've noticed multiple times that Steam's Screen Capture process ended up hanging with HP Reverb G2 and am wondering why do they need to take screenshots? I'd have expected that from Facebook (privacy lol) but don't understand why Steam bothers with it?
Its for the in vr steam overlay to display your desktop.
Steam compositor also takes a copy of the vr view to display within the little steamvr window, in the PIP view.
Is it a multiplayer game? I know eg. Battlefield 2 took screenshots for game server admins to look for cheaters. In the good old days where I wouldn't suspect the screenshots to be used for big data spying ..
I despise ads in all forms, and the absolute worst offenders are ads built into a platform just like this. Windows 10 shouldn’t be advertising on my desktop, PlayStation/Xbox shouldn’t be advertising on my dashboard, cars shouldn’t be advertising on the controls/display, and Facebook shouldn’t be advertising in my virtual reality headset.
Totally agree. I get the deal-with-the-devil that is the free-to-play game / website / email client / social network where I'm getting a service in return for my eyeballs.
But I paid for my Oculus Quest, and then I just paid for a game. I do not therefore want my eyeballs rented out.
Edit: I'd also much rather the Quest platform not become the cesspool that is the free-to-play ad-infested world the iOS AppStore has become. Please can we emulate the Nintendo model and encourage quality games you pay up front for.
You paid for only a part of the Quest, it is the reason I have avoided it.
It is vastly underpriced for the hardware it gives. Some is paid upfront and the rest is paid in data collection etc from facebook.
They have a "unconnected" version for sale for 800 USD and a service fee of 180 bucks. You can see how much you have not paid for in those prices when you go with the ad version.
If the Quest 2 was not associated with facebook I would have owned one a long time ago.
>They have a "unconnected" version for sale for 800 USD and a service fee of 180 bucks. You can see how much you have not paid for in those prices when you go with the ad version.
That pricing isn't for an "unconnected" version, that's for a business/enterprise version and yearly support. You can't use that figure and directly convert that into a value you place on your data or ad revenue.
Your point still stands, the Quest is heavily subsidized by user data on the premise of future ad revenue. This has been a given from the moment Facebook decided merge Oculus and FB acounts into one. I'm just correcting a false assumption that the $800 model is just "Quest -facebook", it's not.
I think there's something everyone is missing. Is this just limited to Oculus? Last time I checked ad platforms do not have a habit of staying voluntarily stuck on just one product line. This is will spread to all VR platforms.
Facebook is getting the blame, but it’s actually game developers who are choosing to add these ads to their games.
I’d be upset if these ads were on the Oculus hardware that I paid for in the games I bought, but if it’s just going into freemium games then it’s business as usual in the ad space. I haven’t even heard of the “Blaston” game the article cites as one of the first games to adopt the ads.
Blame isn't a finite thing, and blaming facebook doesn't reduce the blame that can be giving to the developers. Blame is like the tension in a rope, equal along the length from cause to effect.
Yes, facebook deserves blame. Yes, the game developers deserve blame. These can both be true at the same time.
Out of curiosity, I'm assuming most of the ads are giant in your face ones. Do they do any subliminal product placement type ads too & if so are any of them dynamic based on user data? Might as well go all out & have a variety of props you can exchange based on user data.
I seem to be able to avoid ads quite a bit through tools & life style choices. I therefore ask this as someone whose personal opinion does not like the do anything for views to sell ads economy & avoids it as much as possible.
I understand the dislike of ads, but not so much the complaint. Companies are free to insert ads if they want to, and we're free to choose what media we consume. I hate ads and would be glad to see them outlawed like billboards in Vermont, but I don't stress about it. I accept it as a tradeoff for playing certain games, or I do ad-free things like reading old books or exercising.
>Companies are free to insert ads if they want to, and we're free to choose what media we consume
I'd like to invite you to turn that around. The freedom that we all get to exercise cuts both ways, it is not exclusively for companies to be active and consumers to passively, quietly accept things they dislike.
Citizens are free to complain about ads if they want to, and companies are free to to respond to market pressure by relying on more or less advertisement.
As a company, you might dislike negative consumer feedback, but you should just accept it as a tradeoff for making certain unpopular business decisions, or you should offer ad-free platforms and avoid the problem entirely.
Complaints are not inherently bad. They're just an effective consumer practice.
> Citizens are free to complain about ads if they want to, and companies are free to to respond to market pressure by relying on more or less advertisement.
I agree, but I wasn't commenting at a societal level. I'm saying that at an individual level I see it as a waste of energy to get stressed out about something like ads in video games. There are so many ways to enjoy life, and stress is so bad for health.
I think it's possible to complain without stressing out too much, but perhaps that says something about how much time I've spent complaining on the Internet =)
You see, problem with this is that we don't have a choice. With Oculus Quest, I bought this headset and it didn't had any ads back then. I have to keep it connected to the internet to download and update games but we shouldn't accept state where they can just put ads on my hardware anytime they want.
The problem is that I bought a machine and several games and at no point were any ads involved. Only after they money has changed hands, I’m then told that I need to allow ads into my system.
This is the logical thing, IMO. The fact that people don't even reconsider their consumption is a sign to me that the real issue isn't the ads, it's people not having anything better to do than play VR. I've been playing video games as long as I've been able to read and I'm happy to just go read a book or ride my bike instead if I don't want ads.
In my mind the limit is, if I paid for it, there should not be ads. I can understand using ads to fund a free service, but when I already paid, why am I paying a second time by watching ads? I mean pi hole sorts many of these problems out, but still.
This only works if there are equivalent choices without ads. We know from experience this is rarely the case. Choice is simply an illusion or a fantasy sold to people to placate them into accepting the current paradigm of business ad strategy.
I have a hard time understanding this kind of point of view. Do you not have a choice to just not play VR? Alcohol and other drugs can be fun, yet they're harmful and there's no choice of alcohol without health damage. You just have to choose alcohol and take the health damage or live without alcohol, ditto for VR.
I agree of course, but I dont think that merely stating ones dislike on an internet forum will be an effective way to effect change.
So I pose the question: What actions may we take in order to help ensure a future of non-implementation of "the user is the product" systems, with a specific focus on those actions that are most likely to be the most efficacious at accomplishing the stated goal in an expedient and lasting manner?
So how efficient are for instance the EFF on conveying messages like this to a broader public. I bet that the gaming community for instance would have the technological understanding needed to understand how this is bad for them as consumers.
What's frustrating to me is that all of these platforms _have a store_! When I open the store, I downright _expect_ advertising; it's really helpful in that context to see featured, curated, maybe promoted stuff that I'd otherwise miss. If the ads would simply stay put, I would not mind them one bit, but it seems no platform can resist stuffing them in places that they do not belong.
Yeah so what can we do to prevent this? I would say that the main risk here is that Facebook would be able to get control over the whole VR ecosystem. In worst case so that the top apps only would be usable if you had a Facebook account and with a Facebook device.
That’s pretty much already the case. By now Occulus only exists as a brand inside the Facebook ecosystem, only legacy Occulus accounts are allowed, everybody else uses their Facebook account to login and tie purchases too.
The same Facebook account that FB can at any time arbitrarily block and demand the owner properly ID themselves.
A situation that originally was deemed as “will never happen” when Occulus originally got acquired by FB.
At least there is also Valve to offer an alternative that’s more privacy minded. But this makes their hardware offerings more expensive by default, as the device prices can’t be subsidized by monetizing their users.
At heart Occulus is really an android system right? It would be such a shame if they where to grab control over this ecosystem. Unfortunately their set seems to be the most viable path to mainstream adoption.
Valve exists but Valve's alternative is way pricier and requires a computer right? Facebook would be able to mass-produce these devices at a low cost in a completely different way it seems.
So since it is an android system under the hood it would be very possible to make VR apps that would work on all android systems. This would be so much better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Surely there are WebXR standards that would basically be webapps so they would be totally platform independent however this will surely not cut it for all applications.
Seeing how social media companies can manipulate politics and steer behaviour through ads imagine what happens in a VR only reality. This is a total nightmare scenario.
Would it be possible to try to create some sort of campaign to make people more aware about the bad effects of this lock in. Perhaps by finding a suitable chinese device that remains open and try to favour that over facebooks versions. Sort of how Huawei managed to more or less copy devices at a lower costs and get into the market that way?
Microsofts Mixed Reality standard deserves some attention as well obviously. Again this requires a PC and they seem to be a bit more pricier as well. These wouldn't require base stations as well.
Well, the only "new" headset is the HP Reverb G2 which is indeed in the premium segment. But if you consider the used market, Samsung Odyssey+ is an incredible value option.
I hope Microsoft aren't completely sitting on their asses, they have everything they need to enter the standalone market and provide an alternative to Facebook. They have the Qualcomm partnership, they already have a standalone AR hardware project, it really shouldn't be hard to offer Windows-for-headsets to partners like HP…
I think Lenovo has released Mixed Reality headsets in a lower price range that seems decent.
I think the problem with the PC ecosystem that it is difficult to find an open framework that covers all the different systems.
All in all I am quite impressed with the Microsoft effort. It doesn't seem to lock customers in. There seems to be a possibility to use them with Linux as well.
Also the Microsoft AR system seems quite well executed as well even though it is definitely to costly for mainstream adoption. This is probably by design though and will go down for sure due to economy of scale.
So there would be web technologies that covers most of the platforms, albeit at a performance cost. At the end of the day maybe this is all about which SDK that covers the most platform and is the best for the developers.
>So since it is an android system under the hood it would be very possible to make VR apps that would work on all android systems. This would be so much better for the ecosystem as a whole.
The problem isn't technical, it's monetary. Facebook pours out tons of money to kickstart developers and get games out which is why they have a monopoly. There are few technical hurdles in the way of making Oculus games work on other headsets.
> Facebook added that Oculus users will be able to hide individual ads or choose not to see ads from a certain advertiser.
Very interesting. The Oculus is quite a good deal at 299 USD given its technical specifications. I suspected that they were selling them below cost and subsidising them through stuff like this.
The issue is that, as a data-driven organisation I am certain that they would have assessed the likely impact of including ads on turning away users and made that the decision.
Honestly I personally do not want an Oculus (mostly because it is owned by Facebook and tied to a Facebook login) but if ads allow them to make the platform even more affordable to consumers, this could be a boon to VR overall. Ideally, ads means cheaper hardware which leads to a larger consumer base which entices a larger developer base, and, hopefully, more and better VR games when the dust settles.
I don't understand this obsession with ads. Let's see what a person has to spend to play one of these games:
1. A powerful PC (at least $1000)
2. The headset (at least $300)
3. The game (Beat Saber $30)
So after paying this much ($1330) why is advertising needed? Do AAA games need additional ad funding after selling their games? Do indie game devs need additional ad funding after selling their game?
The problem with ads is that is it inherently disruptive and annoying wherever it is inserted (billboards, movies, TV, youtube, webpages). Why do you want to annoy and irritate customers paying a premium for your next gen platform?
I don't regret my purchase quite yet though. It's been an amazing device for our whole family. The VR bar has been set in eyes of my kids and they want more.
The saddest thing about these VR companies (or any other hyped yet insubstantial new thing for that matter) to me is the fact that they got acquired too quickly that one cannot short them on the stock exchange...
Calling VR insubstantial is absurd. Just because VR helmets won't be as popular as mobile phones doesn't make them so. It's like calling an Xbox insubstantial.
What VR lacks in game variety, it makes up for in how unique the experience is. VR consoles will be able to get new games and apps, while "regular" consoles won't get more unique without releasing new models.
Gaming in VR is also a lot more beginner friendly. Console Controllers are not intuitive, whereas VR controls almost always are.
In short, VR is already very viable and its future is extremely promising. But if you want to short stuff, be my guest.
I get your point. But with all due respect, the comparison is unfortunately off by a substantial magnitude: overall VR devices sold world wide in 2019: <6M (https://www.statista.com/statistics/671403/global-virtual-re...)
xbox sales alone are quite constantly at 50M per month (!!!)
Then it sounds like you're not really getting my point.
VR as is today is a new tech. The Quest 2 is a recent release, second model of a new lineup. Xbox 360 was released in 2005 so look at xbox sales in like, 2006 instead. Which… checks numbers, hey look, 4 million units.
> Console Controllers are not intuitive, whereas VR controls almost always are.
Almost all console controllers follow a similar control scheme for decades (minus the front buttons like "share" or the touchpads). I don't see them as unintuitive.
They are for someone who hasn't ever played a game, easier to get them to learn how to do stuff with vr controllers than with a console controller, vr incorporates far more normal movements that everyone already knows how to do, like picking stuff up or aiming a gun/bow, shooting is easy it is aiming it that is hard.
The experience of VR gaming and desktop gaming is not interchangeable. I tried a modern VR headset very recently and I was blown away by the level of immersion. So many early teething issues from several years ago were actually solved problems. Living room space was a biggie, for instance.
Even if you could, you won't make money shorting on the stock exchange because you think stocks are more expensive than they should be. You can only make money shorting things on the stock exchange when you guess that other investors will think the price is too high relatively soon.
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