> PSVR on the otherhand is broadly compatible with Oculus and Vive in the sense that the games made for one can be adapted to the other
This is actually one of the big problems in developing content for VR, because it's not true. There are different levels of immersion in VR, and you cannot take a game that is full immersion which includes 360 roomscale tracking with hands, to the most limited VR which is front facing tracking without hands. One is being able to walk around and touch things with your hand, the other is sitting in a chair and not being to touch things. Yes, you can use the most basic immersion on any VR system, but my understanding is most people don't want to bother with it because it's boring. One thing the Vive did correctly in my opinion is offering the highest immersion to every buyer - there were no optional wands, they were included (whereas you have to buy them separately for the Rift). 360 tracking is out of the box, whereas with the Rift you need to buy a 3rd sensor for that to work (and they're still having so many problems Facebook has even admitted it's not working properly). The PSVR does not support 360 tracking at all right now, it's intended as a sit down experience.
I see a lot of potential in VR, but I'd say it's 2 generations away from becoming "mainstream" in the sense that there is an active community for it and it's profitable, but it's always going to be a subset of the gaming market (talking solely about VR for gaming, the focus with Facebook is clearly to focus on mobile). Right now it's way too expensive, the resolution is bad, it requires high end video cards to just barely eke out 90 fps when you want 120 fps, and most importantly there is a serious lack of content.
Like another commenter said, VR right now is in the Palm Pilot stages. It's cool and there are early adopters, but it has a long way to go before we're in the iPhone era.
If you make a game that's designed around 360 tracking and utilizing your hands, you can port it to the Rift but only a small fraction of the users would have the necessary hardware and setup for it to work, and you fundamentally could not port it to the PSVR. Right now there are so few VR games that everybody is mostly making tech demos, and it's a bit of a crapshoot how well they work on each piece of hardware as a lot of stuff gets figured out. As more developers commit to the Vive (which polls show is the case) it seems likely that the full experience games won't be ported at all. I foresee a lot of forks within VR gaming, which is bad considering it's seeing much slower growth than many had hoped.
What I suspect will happen is the Vive will dominate for PC gaming (which I suspect will be a niche market), Oculus will dominate mobile (I think this will take 5-10 years and they will be heavily competing with Apple who is leapfrogging VR entirely for AR which I think will be a far bigger market and the true next computing platform), and the PSVR will slowly fade into oblivion the same way that nobody uses a Kinect anymore.
Would you be willing to clarify what your exact position on this is, so that I don't respond to the wrong statement and we end up talking past one another (because I think we're in agreement to an extent):
Is it untrue that PSVR games can be ported to other VR platforms (this is what I was responding to initially and asked for clarification on) or that there are legitimate technical and market hurdles involved in porting from PSVR to other VR platforms?
My initial comment was that it is true because that exact phenomenon is happening, there are multiple titles out that exist across all three major VR platforms and we're about to have more (Good lord almighty will Elite Dangerous hurry up and come out for PS4 already...); so my disagreement starts and about ends there because I thought that's what you were arguing?
Is that no longer the case as you're now talking about demos, and market split between Vive vs PC vs VR and the technical challenges needed to port games among platforms? If this is the case, I-in fact-agree with you.
Again, I just want to make sure I know exactly what I'm responding to.
As more developers commit to the Vive (which polls show is the case)
Would you mind sharing those polls? This is something I'm very interested in as the whole VR space right now has really got me wanting to get back into game development-which was a hobby in high school making 2D platformers-so I'm curious what about the Vive is so attractive to other developers.
More developers are interested in working with the Vive from polls - https://uploadvr.com/htc-vive-gdc-state-of-the-industry-2017... - and admittedly it's anecdotal but everyone I know is exclusively interested in the Vive (ignoring my friends that work at Facebook, but they're not game developers).
Yes, games made for PSVR can be ported to the Rift and Vive. However games designed for the Vive that take advantage of its capabilities probably cannot be ported to the other systems. Basically, the Vive can do more stuff, and if you design you game around that it doesn't port well (or potentially at all) to the other headsets.
This is actually one of the big problems in developing content for VR, because it's not true. There are different levels of immersion in VR, and you cannot take a game that is full immersion which includes 360 roomscale tracking with hands, to the most limited VR which is front facing tracking without hands. One is being able to walk around and touch things with your hand, the other is sitting in a chair and not being to touch things. Yes, you can use the most basic immersion on any VR system, but my understanding is most people don't want to bother with it because it's boring. One thing the Vive did correctly in my opinion is offering the highest immersion to every buyer - there were no optional wands, they were included (whereas you have to buy them separately for the Rift). 360 tracking is out of the box, whereas with the Rift you need to buy a 3rd sensor for that to work (and they're still having so many problems Facebook has even admitted it's not working properly). The PSVR does not support 360 tracking at all right now, it's intended as a sit down experience.
I see a lot of potential in VR, but I'd say it's 2 generations away from becoming "mainstream" in the sense that there is an active community for it and it's profitable, but it's always going to be a subset of the gaming market (talking solely about VR for gaming, the focus with Facebook is clearly to focus on mobile). Right now it's way too expensive, the resolution is bad, it requires high end video cards to just barely eke out 90 fps when you want 120 fps, and most importantly there is a serious lack of content.
Like another commenter said, VR right now is in the Palm Pilot stages. It's cool and there are early adopters, but it has a long way to go before we're in the iPhone era.