Virtual reality faces a real problem: products are too expensive to sell

According to foreign reports, virtual reality hardware and software vendors find themselves chasing a complex new game: expectations.

Although bringing together technology giants including Sony, Alphabet, and Facebook, as well as numerous start-ups and independent developers developing applications for virtual reality helmets, the virtual reality market has not yet reached their expectations.

As this week's video game creators will gather in San Francisco to participate in the annual game developer conference, many industry insiders are annoyed that virtual reality technology may take longer to reach the mainstream audience. In particular, after Facebook invested $2 billion in Oculus VR three years ago, this annoyance became even more obvious.

In the increasingly fierce competition, Oculus seems to have lost its early advantages in pioneering a new generation of virtual reality technology. In high-end helmets that provide rich graphics and the most immersive experience, Sony PlayStation VR has become a clear market leader in terms of shipments. Many analysts and developers believe that the Oculus Rift has a large gap with the PlayStation VR and ranks third in the market, behind HTC's Vive helmet.

Neither HTC nor Oculus disclosed sales figures, but Sony said on Monday that the PlayStation VR helmet, which sells for $400, has sold 915,000 units since it was sold in October last year. Some industry insiders predict that this means that PlayStation VR sales may be more than three times that of the Oculus Rift.

Andrew House, global CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, told the Financial Times that demand for PlayStation VR exceeds supply, and Sony is working hard to increase production capacity. "With nearly 1 million units sold, we were pleasantly surprised by the adoption speed of PlayStation VR and we firmly believe that this product has established a leading edge in this exciting new market."

At the same time, however, many analysts have been reducing their overall expectations for the virtual reality market. CCS Insight, a market research company, predicts that 11 million virtual reality and augmented reality devices will be sold in the global market in 2016, the vast majority of which are cheap smart phone viewing devices such as Google Cardboard and Samsung Electronics Gear. VR. CCS Insight believes that there are only 1.2 million special virtual reality devices for use with PCs or video game consoles. "These data are far below our previous expectations," CCS Insight said in its report on Friday. "The slower-than-expected market growth in 2016 allowed us to postpone the peak time for virtual reality devices by one year."

CCS Insight pointed out that apart from the high selling prices of equipment such as Oculus Rift and Vive, and the need for high-end PCs to support them, “a limited amount of content” also constrains the development of the virtual reality industry.

"I don't think anyone has yet developed a hilarious application for virtual reality," said Minal Hasan, co-founder of K2 Global, a venture capital firm investing in augmented reality helmet Magic Leap. “We are still a few years away from the major breakthroughs in projected content.”

While some developers who have raised millions of dollars and want to develop virtual reality applications can face challenges, some independent game studios are demonstrating that as long as cost management is available, popular virtual reality games can make money. .

Tipatat Chennavasin, a partner of the venture firm focused on investing in virtual reality, Tipatat Chennavasin, predicts that so far at least 8 virtual reality games have generated revenues of more than $1 million. Chennavasin said, "Although the adoption of virtual reality technology is lower than our expectations, the fact that people invest money in virtual reality will continue to create a healthy ecosystem for virtual reality developers."

(VR game "simulation work")

Among these elite teams are Owlchemy Labs, developer of the virtual reality game Job Simulator. Owlchemy Labs, based in Texas, said last month that the company had received $3 million in revenue. Raw Data, another virtual reality game, received $1 million in revenue during its first month of launch.

Chennavasin said that the high price of hardware means the participation of high-end users. However, unlike the fiery situation a year ago, the market has gradually become dull. Chennavasin book, "This is not a gold rush, not all developers can make money."

The background of the Job Simulator game is that in 2050, the robot has replaced the human work, the game player can choose to become the chef, white-collar or convenience store clerk identity to accept the robot's task schedule. With the handle, you can take, grab, smash, and throw things. Basically what you can do in life can be done with the handle in the game. Part of the success of this game stems from the early use of a dynamic sensor gamepad that first appeared in the HTC Vive.

The Oculus-like Touch handle didn't start selling until December last year. It was also one of a series of products that Oculus delayed to release last year. According to sources, with the surge in the number of employees, Oculus failed to achieve a seamless transition from a start-up company to a Facebook subsidiary. A former employee who had worked at Oculus for several years said, “It looks like a mess. In fact, HTC is everywhere, and Oculus originally took a year and a half ahead of other competitors and should completely overwhelm them.”

After the reorganization in December last year, former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe stepped down and focused on the development of the Oculus Rift helmet. Last month, Facebook appointed Xiaomi’s former executive Hugo Barra to take charge of the company’s entire virtual reality business.

Jaulus Rubin, vice president of Oculus Content, told the media this week at the Games Developers Conference that before the company restructured, the number of employees had surged from dozens of people to hundreds. Rubin declined to reveal whether Oculus was having trouble keeping staff, but said that since Facebook acquired the company for three years, "many things have changed from the management point of view, and management needs to be adjusted."

"I think Oculus has now grown from a start-up company to a larger company capable of launching a second device. It is necessary to make virtual reality a next-generation computing platform," Rubin said.

In Facebook's previous earnings conference call, the company's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg once hinted that Oculus's pace of development made him unsatisfied. He said that even if Gear VR sold 5 million units after its listing, the postponement of publishing the Rift and Touch was obviously disappointing. Gear VR is a smartphone-based helmet product launched by Samsung Electronics and Oculus.

Zuckerberg said, “I urge investors to continue to be patient because we have invested heavily in the field of virtual reality, and this investment will not bring us returns or real profits for a long time.”