Oooof that’s unfortunate, it was the platform for reasonably priced VR systems that weren’t made by Facebook (I refuse to acknowledge their rebrand), even if it wasn’t the best software…
This is basically another step towards a situation in which your only VR options are either high end Valve offerings or buying into the Facebook ecosystem.
Even then, the high end Valve offerings don’t have the content. Meta has been very anticompetitive with all the platform exclusives, and it’s hurting VR overall.
I don’t think VR can truly take off until it’s a standard commodity device like a TV.
All back and forward compatible like HDMI. Pair of hand trackers, head tracker, two eyes, maybe extensions for face detection or other limbs.
That way we can be done with all this nonsense exclusivity.
I mean, the Oculus exclusives are literally fully funded. They are games that otherwise wouldn’t even exist. There are no games that were going to be made for other platforms but were steered to oculus only or anything like that. So how anti-competitive can that really be? Should mario games be on other consoles? Is Nintendo anti-competitive for making first party games?
Facebook/meta is terrible, but they are terrible for real reasons, not fake reasons.
Meta has been buying up game developers so they can have a bunch of exclusives. Yes, I’m assuming that the games by the developers would have been made regardless on other platforms. That might be a big assumption given the market share of the quest.
Yes, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc anticompetitive practices are bad too. They do it to try to lock out competitors, and in doing so they decrease access to the content.
With Meta this hits already established PCVR gaming users hard as they will essentially no longer get new PCVR games if Meta keeps buying up the VR game developers. It’s not like they wouldn’t be able to support steamvr through openxr/openvr.
Don’t discount psvr. It’s pricey if you don’t have a ps5 and start from scratch, but many do so it comes into a more affordable bracket then, but still pricey.
i doubt even the best vr game facebook can come up with can beat even the average asset flip on steam. I wish valve made cheaper version of index so more people can better get into actually good vr games. Or some other company made cheaper controller that has similar functions and is compitable.
Steam link works on many oculus devices now. You can have the best of both worlds. Cheap VR platforms and cheap, moddable games through Steam.
