Game Developer shared the results of a recent survey from their sibling company, Game Developer Collective, about virtual reality. What the industry has to say about this segment of the industry is not so sunny.
The survey found that 56 percent of their respondents believe that the VR market is “currently declining or stagnating.” That breaks down to 38 percent who believe it is stagnating, and 18 percent who believe it is declining.
While not every VR company shares all their financial information, we have seen indications of the VR industry’s struggles as we have ourselves ended up reporting on it for GameRanx.
Most of this would relate to the VR headset sold for a game console, of course, the PSVR2. Last March, there was a rumor that Sony paused production on their headsets as stock piled up.
In June, Sony had reportedly made deep cuts in the VR games they were funding. Most recently, Team Asobi made it clear that Astro Bot, the latest game in a franchise that launched on PSVR, isn’t coming to PSVR 2.
Subsequently, the much vaunted Apple Vision Pro had reportedly dropped shipment orders last April. As we can plainly see today, Apple’s entry into the VR/mixed reality market has not turned out well for them or for them at all.
Getting back to the survey, 88 percent of respondents believe that the product category’s limited market size and audience reach are its biggest problems. 53 percent of respondents also believe that their company will never make the switch to VR.
The survey also got feedback from the developers about Apple Vision Pro. 72 percent of respondents believe that the product is not an important moment for the VR market, and its impact on the industry is non-existent.
But we should remember why all these companies decided to go all-in on VR in the first place. Sometime before the pandemic started, the boom was driven by this dream that VR and mixed reality would give way to the notion of a metaverse, a lived world where gamers would spend a significant amount of their time in everyday.
While it looked like tech companies like Sony, Apple, and Meta were pushing a lot of money into VR for the sake of VR, they were all investing in this imagined future where they could be the potential gatekeepers to a virtual world everyone had to interact in.
And it seemed that these companies were willing to spend on this dream indefinitely, but the pandemic has changed everything for them, as much as it has for everyone else, of course.
The game developers may not know everything about the industry, but it’s clear that their sentiments mirror the reality that they see their work in. VR and mixed reality may have a dedicated audience at this point
However, that audience skews upper income, young, and lacking the potential health issues that would disqualify them from using this technology. Even the similarly expensive market for handheld gaming PC portables has a clearer future with a bigger dedicated audience than VR and mixed reality.
If VR will eventually become sustainable, it will be a sustainable niche with a very small number of whales in it, and a far cry from the metaverse the industry expected it to become. And that is the optimistic viewpoint. With so many game projects and jobs fallen to economic conditions, the reality may hit these companies, and VR developers, much harder.
