This looks fantastic! Love the premise & well done for what looks like an incredible solo effort. I was tech lead on Ozymandias & have another minified 4X in the works at the mo & putting out feelers with publishers etc. Sounds like you plan to self publish this one but I’d love to chat & see if there’s any way I can help with your launch, whether just through advice or via introductions etc. You can reach me at biggles (at) bravobravo.games though I may end up finding a way to contact you directly first :-)
Not quite… in the most common version of chessboxing it’s more a case of alternating between the chess & the boxing via, say, a 3 minute timer from the start of each “round”. You do need to be very careful moving the chess board in/out of the ring between rounds so as not to upset any of the pieces but otherwise play just continues round by round until checkmate or knockout (or TKO or a clock falls etc.)
Source: I fought in (and won!) a one-off chessboxing exhibition match in London back in 2012
Hadn’t thought of it in this context before but in game development a “vertical slice” could potentially be thought of as akin to the “pilot plant” in that it’s about proving out the _processes_ for creating game content (and working out how long each piece of content should take to make) before committing to “scaling up” said content production to deliver the full game…
Game development is intensely iterative. One way to think of games is software where its only value is its usability. It has has no process workflows or business goals that it ever sacrifices usability for because the user experience is the value proposition itself. It only sacrifices the user experience for other aspects of the user experience.
Failed and not fun games do happen, but in general game developers put far more weight to this sort of process. There are no other goals that you can claim were accomplished if the users think the game sucks. So you get these ruthless production cycles and there's an appetite to cut things that don't work.
They actually did, one of the approaches they tested included holding down combinations of keys for variable durations (the "Representation 4: Bitmask-Duration Sequence"), however they didn't get any viable runners using that approach. Their conclusion was that with the constraints they were operating under (ie. only 1,000 fitness evaluations etc), the solution space was too broad for that approach to find any viable strategies. Main takeaway for me was that this form of genetic algorithm works best & converges most quickly the simpler you can make the search space.
I’m a solo indie developer trying to do almost exactly what this article advocates for and tbh, I’m not sure it’s been the right move.
I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things.
I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally.
In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc.
Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!
It's a similar situation across all of the arts. The tools are now so widely available and there are so many people doing the work - with varying levels of skill - that the real distinguishing factor is marketing.
Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum.
But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.
DOOM was dropped into an ecosystem of PC magazines and BBSs and almost sold itself - literally with the shareware release. It had almost no obvious competitors. There was some ad spend, but not a huge amount.
Today there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of small/medium games available across multiple platforms. Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.
Meanwhile the AAAs have a budget for carpet bomb marketing. Skyrim spent around $15m, which is an insane sum.
>Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum.
Maybe in 2D, but I still doubt it. Quality animations that stick out are still a hard problem to solve and many tools that tried to solve that problem back in the day (Flash, Spline, etc.) don't suffice these days. If you can emulate the look and feel of a hand drawn animation without requiring 1 year+ from your artists to produce content, there's an entry point.
For 3D is absolutely isn't true. Or at least, it is only true in that 99%+ of indies struggle to even achieve AA scales of graphic in a timely matter, or with a small enough team. There's plenty of room for efficiency here if you want to pursue that (but yes, that efficiency will itself require years of work on not-directly-games).
> many tools that tried to solve that problem back in the day (Flash, Spline, etc.) don't suffice these days. If you can emulate the look and feel of a hand drawn animation without requiring 1 year+ from your artists to produce content, there's an entry point.
Studios still use Flash (now called Adobe Animate) to create great looking art very quickly. I think Massive Monster used Flash for Cult of the Lamb. Klei still uses this process:
>But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.
Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have.
>Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.
It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.
Having a good game is table stakes for sure but I'd not ignore what the OP is saying about marketing spend relating to marketing effectiveness. You can't buy a frontpage slot on Steam but you can do simple things like adding translations that will get your game shown in more regions. Which is quintessentially a marketing activity.
Then you have the ability to affect things through off-platform marketing. If you make use of that to find success the organic discovery on Steam compounds the result.
A good game is table stakes though and good relates significantly to the market segment your game is in. Understanding that is also part of marketing the game.
> Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games.
I would disagree with this, you can absolutely buy your way to the front page of Steam if you know what you’re doing. On Steam, everyone’s front page is different so it’s perhaps not as obvious as hitting the front page of HN though and it’s in the interests of Steam & most successful indies to paint a narrative of purely organic growth leading to great success.
You don’t necessarily have to have an “exceptional game” but you do need to know your audience, what they like & how to reach them. Even then, once you’ve got that stuff down, you don’t just build it & hope they’ll come via the Steam algorithm. That’ll only really help you once you’re over a certain tipping point & it’s getting to that tipping point where the judicial use of a sensible marketing budget will make all the difference.
Bringing it back to the points raised in the article, it’s very much the believe that “all you need to do is make an exceptional game” that causes indie developers to sink years into a single make-or-break game which almost certainly won’t recoup its development costs.
I don’t know about “good” processes, but I definitely have processes… mainly just templates for daily notes & call/meeting notes & a plugin called QuickAdd. Though tbf, I’ve been using more-or-less the same templates since 2018 but in Typora… It’s nice being able to search back across several years of essentially plain-text notes for stuff :-)
Also quite curious about this. Subjectively it certainly hasn’t felt like “the front page of the internet” to me for quite a long time, but suspect that’s just me getting old as well as a reduced tolerance for enshitification. I was always more of a lurker but used to check it multiple times per day & considered it a great source of amusement, up-to-date news, information & opinions on a whole host of topics… Over time though, the more features they added, the less usable the site felt, (even verging on anti-user at times). Combined with feeling like I was getting less value out of the content & it just stopped being a place I’d regularly go to, then eventually a place I’d actively avoid.
For a while, I came back after discovering “teddit.net” but to a much lesser degree & now that doesn’t work any more of course.
Then eventually, last week I needed to do some user research for a new game & was prompted to go looking for relevant subreddits, but most of the ones I found all seemed really dead? To be fair, I was focusing on a particular niche (and it’s possible that the niche itself is less popular now too) but it felt like in the past those sorts of places would have been busier… Of course this is all totally subjective. Was a strange experience though, not quite sure how to describe it… like revisiting a once favourite town but finding the streets empty, all the shops replaced by generic chains & all you old friends having moved out long ago?
Interesting that it actually calls out game developers right at the start despite everything else announced about the headset indicating that they couldn’t care less about gaming on VisionOS…
They didn't talk about VR gaming in their promotional material, but they partnered closely with Unity, and had a whole WWDC session about it. They care. They're probably just not quite ready to make a big deal about it.
Apple has multiple problems here, ones that it can't exactly outpace which is that when they do start making a big deal of gaming they back themselves into a corner. They have to face the problem that VR gaming devices are much cheaper and have similar effect/more studios dedicated to making VR games. They have the other problem that the leading game engine or 3D content in general (Unreal) belongs to a company they would rather see evaporate.
Even with the Epic situation, I'm surprised to see Apple buddying up with Unity after they've merged with a company that used to make Mac-targeted fake "Update Flash Player" adware installers.
Game consoles are a lot cheaper than gaming PCs, but both seem to do ok in the market. General purpose devices always cost more than single-purpose.
And I don’t think they’re losing sleep over Unreal. Plenty of games are done in Unity, and developers who want to ship on multiple platforms are leaning towards Unity in part of because of Epic’s alienation of Apple and other platform owners.
Definitely interesting times, but I don’t think either of those considerations will have an impact on Vision’s success (which is far from assured)
A Meta Quest 2 is just as "general purpose" as Vision Pro. It's basically the Android equivalent to Apple's iOS based Vision Pro. Apple has a bigger problem with the fact that they don't have any sort of VR controllers similar to the Quest's or PSVR2.
That's the point. Vision has to dictate itself as a general purpose device in the market, and so far they haven't done a great job at that. Their reluctance to lean into gaming is a huge part of this desire to present Vision as not some media consumption device but as something you should use daily for creation.
Which is why they are backed into a corner, they have to paint this picture while avoiding the largest 3d engine, ignore stiff competition with other (largely gaming which is important to note since your point about general purpose vs specific is kind of nullified when other VR headsets can handle non-gaming well too) headsets, and get developers on board to start making apps for the new platform before any sweeping changes to the app marketplace take hold.
It would have been nice to see Apple shift their weight behind O3DE instead, as Unity really has been struggling to capture an audience. Would have demonstrated a real commitment to creating 3D content. Those who ship on multiple platforms are really struggling to stick with Unity as it's made their lives harder the past ~5 years, when the same is easily achievable on Unreal or even Godot now.
My bigger question isn't the game studios or even the price, it's the controllers. Remains to be seen what sort of games people come up with that don't require the type of hand controllers with a thumbstick, grip/trigger, and a couple of buttons.
You'll really need to design from the ground up with its very specific input capabilities in mind. Porting titles over that were made for Quest, PSVR, or PC will be difficult.
We've been designing our VR fitness game [1] around hand tracking since Meta first came out with it 3 1/2 years ago. So far I can say that we did not regret it, but it definitely requires some workarounds around the accuracy and speed you get from controllers.
My hand tracking experience on my Quest 1 was unimpressive (though I haven't bothered to try again recently), maybe the Quest 2 is better. Even for just navigating the UI, the pointing part works fine but pinching to click was entirely unreliable.
With its eye tracking and much stronger hand tracking hardware I expect Apple's will work nearly perfectly, just a matter of how people support it in games.
Teleport movement is a big question for me, convention for that on controllers is to push the thumbstick forward, aim the targeting arc, and release. Will everyone be making up their own teleport movement gesture, and eventually the market will settle on an expected way to handle it?
Will games where you pretend to be holding something (mini golf for instance) feel weird with just hand tracking, and nothing to actually hold?
Apple has gone back and forth on if they care about games but I don't think I'd call it contempt. A bad strategy where they burn bridges with game developers due to talking a big game then not following through? Absolutely but "contempt" is a step too far I think.
When they released an Apple TV with an app store, casual gaming seemed an obvious use.
But they came with a controller that seemed to be designed with the goal of ensuring that it was as useless as possible for gaming (also as useless as possible for entering passwords!)
Apple is the third largest game platform. They don't have contempt for games. They just have no idea what exactly the vision pro will turn into so they aren't backing it down a path they can't return from. Selling it as a gaming device means that if they don't have the gaming market quickly enough, they might not be able to pivot to other markets. It's an open (ish, for apple) platform that the market will decide what it is to become.
You're gatekeeping gaming. Most mainstream games have some type of slot machine mechanic for virtual skins that are cash cows or are even pay to win. Apple also created a apple arcade to specifically curate games that aren't pay to win cesspools.
It might be a better take that apple generally treats games on an equal level to every other category of software. They just don't get much special treatment, historically at least ... ios may have changed that drastically (apple arcade is certainly a step in a direction). Meanwhile MS (even pre xbox) carved out work for them with things such as directx directinput etc.
But Apple used to be pretty great for gaming. I remember playing tons of games like pong or snake clones, dark castle, shufflepuck cafe or airborne on our Mac SE when I was a child.
They showed hints of what this could do outside of the floating windows in their announcement.
Like the Dinosaur coming out of your wall and then also talking about Unity.
We have to remember that when they talked about this it was around a year (or more if it isn't delayed) away from shipping and they talked about it at a developer conference. It was clear that they were focused on the technology it has and the mostly Apple developed experience of it.
I still don't fully understand where the idea that this could not be used for gaming came from, except maybe the lack of (VR) controllers but I can't imagine not being addressed by the Mifi program later down the line.
> I still don't fully understand where the idea that this could not be used for gaming came from
In the keynote they showed exactly one scene with a game: someone picks up a console controller and starts playing a basketball game... on a flat, virtual TV. That communicated pretty clearly to me that they didn't have any interest in VR gaming for this device.
EDIT: Not the keynote, but this video [0] at 3:22 pitches gaming in exactly the same way: you get a big screen!
I remember that, but just because they showed that doesn't mean that there are not other fully immersive capabilities.
Like I said, we are talking about a product that is at least a year away when they first showed it off and they did tease other 3D setups.
To me all that ever said was, hey you can pair a controller to this if you want. A natural extension of being able to watch a movie or whatever.
I feel like saying no games based on that presentation was very premature. Really saying almost anything about what this can and can't do except for exactly what we were shown is premature given the large chunk of time between announcement and release and needing to see what developers can actually do with it once all of the pieces are ready.
Yeah, I agree that saying "no games" is inaccurate, but I do think that Apple does not intend to prioritize "serious" games on this device.
The way I read the keynote is that they intentionally left out any spectacular gaming content because they very much do not want people to treat the Vision Pro as a gaming device like the Oculus. It's intended to for a very different set of use cases, and they tried very hard to communicate that with the emphasis on passthrough and productivity.
So while that doesn't suggest that there will be no games, it does suggest to me that the hardware and software will lend themselves much more to the casual games that are already prevalent on Apple's devices, rather than appealing to the PC or console gaming audience.
Not saying it can’t or won’t be used for gaming, but the lack of precisely tracked 6dof controllers does severely limit it from being usable with a lot of popular genres of VR games: thinking Beat Saber & Pistol Whip specifically but anything with swords/guns/bows & arrow or generally precise twitch-based mechanics will likely not work well with just hand tracking.
MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game…
I can imagine lots of game genres that could work fine but they’ll only be economically viable if the market for VisionOS games itself is big enough to support such a business model or if Apple jump-starts things by investing heavily in individual titles. Their messaging to date hasn’t really suggested that they’re interested in playing that game though.
> MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game
Yeah, you're already talking about the most expensive headset, nevermind that added cost for controllers. With this price tag you're going to be talking about a tiny installed base.
If it's easy enough to port stuff... and the controller ecosystem develops... well, sure, I guess this thing could find its niche. From an ROI perspective though it can't possibly be the primary target for game developers, which means it gets ports... and with ports to niche platforms there's always the risk of low quality / jank, which would only hurt the brand.
I think eventually we may see some tracked controllers, perhaps they shied away from them for launch because they would add to the already higher than expected price point and won't be used in most of the work-focused scenarios they seemed to present. Having to stop typing to pick up a controller to twiddle some 3d ui and then swap back to keyboard seems .. shitty.
Absolutely, controllers don’t make sense at all for most of those kinds of use cases, and would only add friction.
A device like this already has so many conflicting constraints to deal with that I’m not really surprised that they didn’t prioritise the things that would benefit gaming.
Hand controllers may well come a few years down the line (if the product line survives that long), but it’s very much in line with their behaviour historically to initially avoid requiring additional input devices: anyone remember how long it took Apple to release a stylus for the iPad?
Also seems like their efforts to protect privacy by restricting direct gaze input access may make certain kinds of gaze-related input actions tricky to implement, but the Unity video shared earlier suggested that they may be giving developers more access to that stuff (at least via Unity-based apps) than they’d previously implied.
Assuming their hand tracking is super fast (no noticable latency over controllers like on the quest), the biggest loss to not having controllers is haptic feedback. I can see haptic feedback being useful even in non-gaming situations, feeling buttons is better than not feeling buttons.
Oh that also, though I'm not sure how useful that is in productivity scenarios (I don't have enough imagination). IF gesture tracking was super accurate, there would still be the problem of haptic feedback. Someone needs to invent a VR glove that allows us to feel things.
> Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
> Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.”
It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
Might have just been based on what they could show at demo time – they can handle some core productivity stuff, but might not have had the time/access/team to put together something compelling on gaming for that date.
I think they were trying very hard not to be pigeonholed as a games device.
If they had made a part of the presentation (outside the 3 second mention of Apple Arcade) about playing games I could see a lot of people spending even more time comparing it to an Oculus or PSVR2 and complaining it was insanely priced.
Instead they did a pretty decent job of getting people discussing non-game use cases.
I think the biggest problem is the controller and locomotion. Almost all VR games available right now use controllers to navigate around the virtual world. Meanwhile Apple has shown nothing that allows you to move around in the virtual world. All locomotion you do on Apple's headset happens in the real world via AR, the fully immersive experiences are basically limited to standing or sitting in place.
This has the advantage of dramatically increasing the comfort, since motion sickness is largely caused by artificial locomotion with the controller, but it also drastically limits what kinds of games you can do in VR.
I would expect them to expand on this area eventually, but I can understand why they wouldn't for the announcement, as for the time being they want the focus on VisionPro as a friendly computer/monitor/TV/cinema replacement.
I wonder if there is a way to stimulate the vestibular system externally to make it feel like actual locomotion and perhaps improve on the motion sickness.
I don't think so. While you can artificially stimulate the vestibular system, getting that to work precisely across all the users of the headset would be rather tricky.
But the even bigger issue is that even if you overcome that, you still have the fundamental problem that a correct vestibular response is extremely important to keep users from falling over. If you artificially give people the impression that they are accelerating or decelerating, they'll automatically compensate and lean into it and just fall over. This happens already often enough just from the visual stimulus alone, if you mess with the vestibular system those accidents would get a lot worse.
That said, maybe there is some middle ground that could work where you don't create a real virtual vestibular input, but just a little jolt to notify the brain that something is going in, even if that something isn't matching the visuals. Many people report having less issue with motion sickness when they walk in place or bob their head. PlaystationVR2 has a small rumble motor build into the headsets with is supposed to help a little bit here as well.
There's the How Much Will the Vison Pro Cost game, there's the When Will the SE 3 Come Out game, there the Will they Fix the Macbook Keyboard game,
there's the How Many Ports Will It Have game, there's the Will They Give It HDMI and USB-A ports game, the Will They Switch Away From Intel game. You think I'm being facetious, but if you look at a game simply as a thing you spend time doing, and then consider the amount of digital ink spilled discussing those topics online and in-person discussions being had about them, the meta Apple is endlessly entertaining.
Uses of VR/AR outside of gaming are going to be niche. Gaming use cases could also be considered niche within the realm of gaming. For entertainment outside of gaming, observe any young person consume a long piece of content like a show/movie and they probably have another device nearby they are texting on. The goal for VR/AR should be distracted entertainment not immersive entertainment like most examples show.
Mainstream use cases like office workers (I don't think Apple depicted this) are less likely in my opinion. Typical office workers (not developers/engineers like on here) are given a bare bones budget PC to do their job, like total spend of $500. Even if form factors for VR/AR get to "comfortable for 8 hours" levels I still don't see the ROI on the hardware for commercial purposes like office workers - most VR/AR headsets require some other compute device as well.
> Typical office workers (not developers/engineers like on here) are given a bare bones budget PC to do their job, like total spend of $500.
The market here isn't typical office workers, it's execs and high-value workers like software devs. They won't even have the production at a scale large enough that it could be available to typical office workers en masse for years at a minimum.
Execs are typically spending their day mostly doing face to face things. Developers can have a lot of pixels in front of them very cheaply these days. I fail to see ROI in these use cases either. Being "more productive" usually doesn't quantify very well if it is all just a feeling.
How do you propose measuring developer productivity though? Lines of code written? Unfortunately we've yet to figure out a metric for developer productivity other than "a feeling" and as a developer, sometimes I work better when other people are in the room. Unfortunately, the cheap pixels with a high ROI that are available to me don't travel well, so I either have to go somewhere and be confined my laptop, or someone else has to come to me and be confined to their laptop. (Having an office where that happens is so passé these days.) I have no idea if Apple Vision will let that be different, and $3,500 is too much for me to shell out, but I want to be in my home office but also have my home office colocated with everyone else's home office. Maybe I can setup my office in a self-driving car and it can shuttle me and my desk around to meetings.
They couldn't care less about being the ones developing games, but they DO care very much about being the ones driving productivity apps which opens a whole corporate world for them to control.
In an interview John Carmack did with Lex Friedman recently, one of the things that Carmack pointed out is that VR games such as Beat Saber were a perfect fit for requiring a controller since it was natural to move and slice through something without significant physical feedback (at least as represented in the game).
However, most VR games that require a controller for VR interactivity with "real world objects" tend to fare less well as they create a cognitive dissonance between the actions the player is taking and their perceived results. Anecdotally, for the few VR demos I've tried I agree.
The Novint Falcon is a force-feedback controller that gives that feedback. Imagine holding a pencil for writing, and using it to scratch the surface of a sugar cube and feeling the indentations, and then also touching the sides of it to literally feel out how big it is.
You might as well write “Not having a keyboard or mouse will be pretty limiting for gaming” fifteen years ago before mobile gaming took off.
Yeah, it will be limiting for the preexisting games built for preexisting VR systems. It will also be perfect for the types of games people envision and build for this generation of device. Not recognizing that seems more like a lack of imagination on your part than a failure of design on Apple’s.
Oh no, I thought of that. As a matter of fact I'm currently developing a VR game that would work just fine without controllers.
Still, sometimes you need buttons. While mobile gaming is obviously huge there are certain types of games that just don't work all that well on it. In the gaming space Apple will be directly competing against other VR headsets designed for gaming. Mobile games don't really directly compete with consoles or PCs.
This isn't going to improve until Apple gets a leadership overhaul. Look at the current executive team, it's all a bunch of boomers who think "gaming" is candy crush and farmville.
Their Mac announcement was basically a catch-up release to get DirectX working on Metal roughly as-well-as the Open Source Vulkan translator. If that's not an apology release, I don't know what is - it feels pretty clear that Apple's obsession over platform control has hamstrung game developers. They could have been a Steam Deck, but they chose to be a Steam Machine.
The unfortunate reality is it is also not 100% up to Apple to fix the issue.
Windows has a very strong grip on gaming and you have to convince consumers and developers that it's worth it.
The Steam Deck kinda got around that with Proton but it also means that if that becomes the norm for anything other than Windows, it is only fixing one of those problems while developers still continue to target and optimize for the main platform (Windows)
Apple had a shot at dethroning DirectX when they helped Khronos write the Vulkan spec. They eventually abandoned it in favor of Metal, but things would look very different if Mac, Linux and Windows all shared the same GPU APIs today. Even without Macs, both Windows and Linux have functional DirectX translators that MacOS could have also enjoyed for the past half-decade.
Part of the problem is dethroning Windows. The other part of the problem is not being so greedy that you make Microsoft look reasonable by comparison.
I’m still pretty convinced that the only compelling use case for VR in the short-to-medium term is gaming despite both Apple & Meta apparently trying their hardest to pretend otherwise!
Having said that, perhaps this move indicates that Meta are finally acknowledging that’s where they should have been focusing their efforts all along?
I don't think you're right about this. In fact, I think the killer AR/VR apps will be utility apps.
My friends and I watch a movie in VR every week and it's the highlight of my week. It's all I use my Quest 2 for. Just sitting in a fake theater, not moving, talking over movies in spatial audio.
There is a problem with VR games. They eventually make you feel sick if you move around. They can make you sweat. Most people sit on their couch to watch T.V. to relax because they don't want to move around or sweat. VR/AR gaming is gimmicky as hell.
AR is going to kick start a revolution as soon as people discover they no longer need to go to a movie theater, deal with Ticket Master's fees, or buy a TV again. As soon as they realize they never need to buy another monitor -- or multiple monitors.
Conversely, VR gaming is excellent workout. I normally hate most sports and fitness, but there's no shortage of stuff on the Quest that keeps me engaged enough to push myself into getting a good exercise.
OTOH if you just want to sit and watch a movie, a modern decently large 4K TV offers much better visuals. The only reason I see for doing that in VR is when you don't have room for a large TV - say, when travelling - but even then you don't really need a full-fledged VR for that, you just need a simple headset that can work as a secondary display (and I have such a device that connects to my phone using USB-C).
i still want use-anywhere sunglasses that plug into my laptop and give me monitors at an ergonomic height to use in libraries/cafes/parks. Like sightful without the weird computer
Xreal come close but for this use case not ready yet but if they ever release v2 with 4k resolution per eye + programmatically dimmable shades + better software then that would be better then vision pro or oculus for this use case
Those are already available from several brands (XReal the most well-known at the moment), though probably still in alpha mode as regards what people will actually buy and feel happy with.
If there is one, single redeeming really cool feature of the Quest Pro (possibly the 2 as well, I haven't tried this), it's using your controller "upside down" as a virtual dry erase marker in Workrooms.
I just wished that was available in other apps too.
