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Yup. Agreed. I found myself in the same position and forced myself to stop buying the cheap games after I made a backlog collection on Steam and realized I had 20 games I hadn't even installed yet, some of which I bought 3 years ago. lol Again, not blaming the consumers or the devs. Just interesting how we got here and I'm curious how it affects the industry moving forward, just like movies having shorter theatrical runs now with the rise of streaming services.

Wouldn’t have sold better on any other platform and frankly Nexus never gets made if Meta hadn’t funded the development in the first place, so I would imagine exclusivity was part of the deal. It also had the typical Ubisoft marketing plan (read: nonewhatsoever). Ubisoft’s on a string of Ls lately because their marketing department fell asleep at the wheel.

Interesting…

A burger is ALWAYS worth it, my friend. Don't get me started on Asgard's Wrath 2's reception. I'm in Sanzaru's Discord and the number of people who grind 20 hours of the monthly event in a weekend and then say the devs aren't doing enough drive me up a wall. That's one of the biggest games in VR ever made and THAT is not enough? Yikes.

I got Skyrim on cheap, but I "paid" for it in the amount of time I burned getting mods to play together nicely. lol And believe me this isn't me saying everyone should be buy every game on day 1. It's more about how we're evaluating a game's worth. I feel like games in general, thanks to the discount culture, are WAY more devalued than just a few years ago, particularly in VR. I hold Valve & Meta equally responsible for this.

1) Oh good God, yes. I played Saints & Sinners ch2 on launch day and wanted to break my headset. Terribly buggy. 2) I never pay full price for these because I refuse to play in public lobbies, so I'm only likely to fire one of these up if I have friends available. 3) YUP! 100% agreed. Part of why I tend to stick to singleplayer games. Rarely have that issue.

Totally agree on the timing and I alluded to that in the pod a bit. If there's a better deal to be had and I'm not heavily compelled to play a game day one, I usually take the deal. There's a follow up podcast to be had here about games marketing and creating that excitement we used to have about playing a game right away. On your second point, while I do agree with that, I think inflation over the last 40 years of gaming covers that cost. When I first started driving as a teenager in the 90s, a gallon of gas here in Georgia was less than $1. Now it's around $3.50-$4. A near 400% increase. I paid the same amount of money for Ocarina of Time ($60) as I did for Breath of the Wild 20 years later. The cost of commodities all over the world have gone up, but gaming remains stagnant? How and why? Because going digital cut out all of those costs you mentioned. Otherwise games would be $100+ a pop right now.

I will be revisiting this in the fall when the "big" releases start coming and tracking those as best I can. I agree on Vertigo 2. Sometimes it pays to know your worth and not compromise on it. Vertigo did have the advantage of being a darling of the enthusiast community, so it was guaranteed visibility a lot of games simply don't have. You and I have both discovered some hidden gems by taking a flyer on a cheap game we didn't know about it. I talked to a community manager who flatly told me the discount is being written off as a marketing expense, similar to the hundreds or thousands of dollars they would've spent on ads and sponsored coverage. I'm really interested in the follow through. Okay, you got someone to pick up your game for dirt cheap and now your developer posts are in their Steam or Meta news feed whether they installed it or not. Can you use that to draw them in? Or do you just care about the ancillary sales so you can pay the bills?

@@michelleb5177 Yup! I cut this put of the video, but I have a dozen I haven’t played yet and that’s after an effort to cut the backlog down.

Yep and the line's different for everyone. I'm a bargain shopper too, but I will pay a premium for a developer I want to support. I just find the shift fascinating. Before this age of extreme discounts, hardly anyone batted an eye at $40-$60 a pop (this would be pre-VR mind you). Thanks for checking out the pod!

I HEAR you on being broke. lol. Thanks for watching!

Big ball too.

See quantity to me isn't nearly as important as quality. I've paid $60 for a 100hr JRPG that was mid AF and felt ripped off, but dropped $40 on Stormland and (mostly... minus the non-ending) feel like I got my money's worth. I also don't particularly care for roguelites and F2P games, so most of mine have a pretty finite playtime. Everyone's standard is different though, for sure.

@@liveopenmike quantity isnt as important as quality but imo it’s still important to a degree. I wouldnt wanna pay $40 for a game that has high quality but is only 2 hours long. It will be different for everyone. But yes quality is more important but quantity still holds some weight

Yeah even at the top tier of $50 a month, you'd have to be on Shadow for about two years to equal the price of a decent PC for playing PCVR, so there's a decent value proposition there, if you have the internet speed to make the experience worthwhile.

I'm genuinely curious how many people end up buying a PSVR2 now with the adapter coming to market. The lack of features makes it a less attractive option. I'm sure it will work just fine because Sony doesn't really put out subpar tech, but will the value be there if you're buying a PCVR headset that has eye tracking and additional haptics that no SteamVR game will take advantage of. I know enthusiasts will buy it because we'll buy mostly anything, but is this attracting casuals?

@@liveopenmike With eye tracking, I was thinking that it could be the best affordable headset for PCVR and VR Chat, but because of those disabled features, now I think that it will only be useful for people who already owns the headset.

@@NinjaGuyVR For VRChat, yes. Jury’s still out on PCVR as a whole. We’ll have to see how that software performs.

Agreed. I even like some of the VR modes like No Man's Sky, but I always prefer the 'native' version of a game. I'm well aware that people disagree and that's fine. Thanks for watching!

Agreed. I think VR suffers from shaky marketing in general and LIV can only help with that.

@@samson143vr SHOCKING that a Meta update broke something that worked before… 👀

Yes I have and I hate that UEVR is deluding people into thinking putting VR into a game is easy. Thousands of games either don't have motion controls (a dealbreaker for me personally) or run at an unplayable framerate that would make most VR newbs puke. I'm glad UEVR exists as I think it's a great retention tool for PCVR diehards, but I hate this narrative that devs are lazy because VR modes are "easy" to make now. The good thing is UEVR is having developers take a second look at VR implementations AND the founding of Flat2VR Studios off UEVR's success will give us PROPER VR modes and ports. And yes, you need a beefy PC. I run a 3070 with 96 gigs of RAM and my rig was screaming for mercy on a couple of tests I ran.

I don't think it's delusional that it's easy to go into vr with the injector. I'm horrible at tweaking games and mods on pc. If I could do it anyone can. It's very easy to learn. But a game pad seems to be the best way so I understand it being a deal breaker for you. I have played with the injector starwars fallin order, stray, robo cop city' terminator resistance and I'm now playing kena bridge of the spirit. I enjoy using the touch controllers on my quest 3 for some games besides using the injector. There are a few goo😅😅d triple a vr games coming out in the near but the triple a huge dry spells will continue and the triple a games coming out are going to be good. I'll be playing them. But they can't hold up against the flat games that cost 100 to 200 million to make. I've been in vr since 2015 when I used the Samsung inovator addition. You had to put your phone in the headset and it would overheat every 20 minutes but I loved it. Even though your using a gamepad being in these triple a worlds is mind blowing everytime I go to a new game. Heres how the math works for me. Triple a game plus gamepad= an incredible vr experience. Average quest or made for pc vr game using touch controllers = mediocre experience. Yesterdays Uploads showcase could have been 10 minutes if they cut out all the shovel ware crap.

@@rickaron7593 I'm not saying use of the injector is difficult. I'm saying UEVR has people believe that proper VR modes from developers are easy to create and they're NOT. I agree on VR not standing up to triple A games, but the idea that hybrid games will bring in a ton of new users is a theory I just don't agree with, for the reasons I laid out in the video.

​​@@liveopenmike I agree hybrid won't do much in bringing in new users. It's a process. It took decades for video gaming to get where it is. Vr will work the same way.

@@rickaron7593 100%. Flat gaming has a 40 year lead. However, I think mobile gaming got it right. That industry leaned into its strength (low effort, rapid but simple interactions, quick gameplay loops) and built around that. Traditional games haven’t worked on that platform (have you seen the numbers on Death Stranding and AC Mirage?). I’m saying that to say leverage VR’s strengths and lean into what makes it special instead of “hey come play all the games you already play.”

Yes, that's the point behind this podcast. I think there are tons of things in VR that don't get discussed openly either to protect relationships with developers or because it doesn't draw views and frankly, the metrics on this podcast bear the second point out. However, I think it's necessary to evolve VR discussion beyond the shallow low hanging fruit a lot of channels do. I didn't agree with him all the time, but I loved Thrillseeker's work when he was heavily into content production and wish there was more of that.

Thanks, fam!

I wish we could get direct numbers from companies like Cyan (Firmament, Riven), Hello Games (No Man’s Sky), and so on, but companies unlikely. Someone on X is trying to push the point the hybrids don’t require significant development and this is what I feared when UEVR was introduced. Everyone now thinks it’s super simple to make a proper VR mode.

Yeah I would like to see the numbers on Riven in a month or two or Firmament, both of which launched with full VR support. I'd love to see the split on No Man's Sky now. Demeo's a special case because it was VR first, so it's not a selling point to flatscreen gamers. Thought I'd be curious of the split of a primarily VR game that launched on both (like Demeo Battles). At the end of the day, the point is I can't see someone dropping hundreds of dollars for an alt version of a game they can already play on a platform they're not familiar/comfortable with, particularly one known for shorter play sessions. Like imagine someone who plays No Man's Sky on PC buying a Switch Lite just to play it there. Crude example, but a similar circumstance.

@@liveopenmike Lets be real, Nintendo is a cult, they might just. lol But yeah, I understand, and largely agree. VR has to live and die on its own value proposition. It can have fun or good hybrid experiences, but they aren't the secret recipe that will suddenly cause the products to fly off the shelf. If you want my opinion, price is part of it but I still put 90% of the issue down to friction. Until VR can be put on as easily as a pair of goggles or a set of glasses, it's going to be a niche product.

@@Kymlaar If Nintendo's a cult, I'm a card carrying hood wearing member. lol Friction is a MASSIVE part of it and so many VR enthusiasts have blinders to it. They refuse to acknowledge that, ya know, VR might not be for everyone.

@@liveopenmike People with lots of time or motivation don't understand how other people's capacity for 'doing' can be burnt up. I have literally ordered dinner to be dropped off because I didn't have the mental capacity at that moment to handle going downstairs and tossing a frozen pizza in the oven.

@@Kymlaar AMEN!

Agreed. There's a general lack of awareness and rose tinted glasses about the power of VR to draw interest there. As much as I love it, I'm also a realist. And I used the base pricing of PSVR2 and PCVR because the Quest doesn't have hybrid flat/VR games, for obvious reasons, so for purposes of this discussion, that didn't factor in.

@@samson143vr This one is shorter because I recorded it right before the UploadVR showcase.

Welcome aboard, NinjaGuy!

SHOCKING that this is your answer.

​@@liveopenmike 😛

Goes up in an hour. I prescheduled it.

🧐

Creative editing lol

@@liveopenmike 😵‍💫

Well there are legitimate reasons for a few of them, but it's telling that these were all Sony published. :(

Thanks for watching!

Gotcha. Thanks, Samson!

I appreciate it, Beavis!

@@Hallow.X Bigscreen has zero additional onboard compute or really any moving parts at all because the IPD is fixed as well (they set it in the lab when making your facial interface). Easier to add on that mod in that case. Also Bigscreen is $1k WITHOUT any controllers or lighthouses. Well out of Meta’s range.

@@liveopenmike yea ik but the components for the mod cost around 50 dollars and when companies like meta buy in bulk from source the components price goes down buy buy about half

@@Hallow.X That's just the component cost (BOM). You're not factoring in mass production, distribution, and quality assurance at the scale Meta would need to be at. EyeTrackVR, the mod you're referring to, wouldn't work at scale, like a lot of these mods you see for headsets. That's why they never go official. They can't scale properly. Your typical markup for a product is MUCH higher component cost, so even with Meta's subsidizing a $50 BOM, you're looking at about $100 - $200. Not worth it when the adoption rate is that low.

Algorithm ftw! My eye tracking video from last year pissed a lot of people off, so I doubled down. lol

So it's Meta's fault it's not standard at the consumer level yet? ETDFR wasn't even usable by a lot of devs until URP and Unreal 5 were widely available, so with the timing of devkit availability and devs switching engines, the usage likely wouldn't be any higher than it is now. Plus I'd like to get more than 90 minutes on my Quest 3. But to each their own. I think it's standard in the next generation of headsets, Quest or otherwise.

@@liveopenmike Eye tracking isn't so Nasa tech. I'll admit that we don't need eye tracking all. it is too simple of a tech to not be a consumer tech.

@@GirlOnAQuest the word I used was nascent, as in still in the early stages

@@liveopenmike lol fair point for the battery problem!

I think we'll eventually get another Pro level Quest headset, but that first one bombed. lol. Meta's trying to straddle this line between making a high end headset, but still making it somewhat affordable and that catch 22 means they'll still make compromises on it. Apple dropping a $3,500 bomb on the industry has been interesting to watch, but outside of content creators chasing views & techheads, the reception has been lukewarm from the average consumer and Meta has to see that. It's a fine line to walk.

See my point about development cycles. These headsets started development probably 2-3 years ago when eye tracking tech was still very nascent and really expensive. I think next cycle of headsets, eye tracking becomes standard across the board.

@@liveopenmike I listened to the entire podcast and understand all the points you made. I can't help but to shake my head when people mention throwing features on these VR HMD's like META put together the Quest 3 in just a few months. The general public and even VR enthusiasts don't truly understand what all goes into making a quality VR headset for consumer release. Years of research & design, with each part meticulously chosen. But like I said, I understand why the Quest 3 didn't have eye tracking. Unlike the majority, I've been craving widespread eye tracking implementation for years now. It's something that will eventually get here at a large scale and when it does, it'll be a game changer for consumer VR. For now, enthusiasts have their taste.

Try dropping your brightness a hair?

I believe you’re in the minority though. Even $500 was too much for a lot of Quest 2 owners, hence why Quest 3S is coming.

@@liveopenmike I believe you. I’m just tired of buying brand new headsets while already thinking of the next headset I’m going to get later. It reminds me of when I was a child and I had my flip phone, a small camera, an MP3 player, and a GameBoy, all stuffed in my pocket. I could just see the future and it made me upset every time I had to buy something that was not that. When the iPhone came out, I was glad to pay what was at the time a lot of money for a phone.

I agree. Still didn’t make sense for Quest 3.

Hello! 😊

@@liveopenmike I meant to write you crazy! 🤭 I like this new format. Good stuff.

I don’t think Meta goes OLED until production yields get better. Sony and Apple couldn’t produce a million units in a single production run for their headset and low production yield equals higher pricing.

All that and you either have 1 hours of battery life or a very heavy headset (or an external battery)

It doesnt have to OLED - ill take QLED of Quest PRO and like 4x the dimming zones, that be a good stepping up and WAY better then standard LCD we got now

@@mastorasmars2326 That's more feasible, yeah.