Watch Dogs Graphics Downgraded on PC

[TheFeniX]

I disagree. I think these problems are solvable. People seem to love VR (at least as soon as they´ve tried it), even non gamer people, so there will be quite a market and there´s allready a lot of money in the business. Furthermore it´s not just a graphical gimmick but actually adds plenty of gameplay value.

I don't disagree with you. But it seems to be in the same boat as the Kinect: developers are terrified to support it because it cuts into a market that doesn't have it and even if you just add support: why waste money adding said support when you can focus on the 100% of your market that already has a TV/monitor?

Oh, sure, the 30 FPS + MB will only cover up the stuttering. Just like in a movie. It does nothing for latency. Some games, like Vendetta pointed out, don´t really need that good latency, though, so 30 FPS + MB might be a decent solution.

The solution doesn't solve the current problem: the current crop of consoles are more outdated than my 5 year old PC and are not upgradable. Even if they somehow upgrade the hardware, developers probably aren't willing to alienate a portion of their playerbase when they can't even be bothered currently to give PC gamers the edge in graphics and frame-rate their hardware will allow. As this generation continues, it's going to get even worse.

As said, 30FPS can work well for slower games. I loved Gears of War 1 and 2, but that framerate was definitely noticeable. It was a trade-off, one that worked very well, but still a trade-off. 60FPS would have only made that game better if the hardware could have supported it.

But none of that really matters. What Mr Bean has been stating is: the latest consoles are woefully underpowered. We're a year in an there's nothing left to "unlock." As for my part: from what I know of the 360 APU and the PS3 cell is that early developers for the platforms didn't know what they were doing. Games looks and played "ok." And by ok, I mean Fight Night looked fucking amazing for a console game, even if it ran like shit. As the platform matured, games utilizing the hardware better made us think there was more power than there was. But it was really that they had crammed some powerful hardware into a box and (at least MS) decided to sell it at a loss.

Now, they've got to make money. Both consoles are selling for a profit and there's nothing fancy about either one. Nothing really to learn: just $400-$500 computers with proprietary operating systems. And "you can't build a gaming PC for that money" is in effect.... and we're all fucked because games are now being optimized for the low-end of the hardware scale.

30FPS isn't even a choice for them if they want to push anything but corridors of dudes to shoot/stab. Asscreed wants loads of wandering NPCs a bit above the level of GTAs "everything just drops in, then disappears when you look away because we have no RAM" and I give them credit there. What I don't give them credit for is that they're such bitches about it trying to convince me this is a good decision in of itself, rather than one based on the pragmatism of "the hardware we're working on is shit."

I was there when Epic fanboys were fucking pissed about GoW. CliffyB just came out and said "the hardware won't do what we want to do at 60FPS." Now we have people trying to convince us it's better than 60FPS with "cinemetronic aspirations!"

[Mr Bean]

Slight modification TheFeniX. What I'm pointing out is that consoles are a balancing act and they decided they wanted to make a profit so they took a decent GPU (The Radeon 7870) put a decent amount (8 gigs of ram) put in the same hard drive 500 gig hard drive, slapped on a low usage OS and called it a day then remembered they had to find a CPU for it as well and went out back and dug up a 10$ AMD laptop CPU that was built to compete with the Intel Atom series four years ago and threw it in. It's so bottom tier that the entire rest of the system is held back.

Redgaming tried some tests with equivalent jaugar style cpu from AMD produced for the mobile market and what they found was something like an old sandy bridge 2500k turned in six times the performance on CPU centric benchmarks like Prime Pi calculations, PassMark and 3Dmark CPU tests and the like. For example here is a quote from PC world over a year ago now

First, there's the matter of the CPU cores. Without getting into technicalities, AMD's Jaguar architecture is the impending successor to the "Bobcat" architecture found in the company's current low-power APUs, and it is not especially beefy. While the idea of an octa-core console sounds dreamy on the surface, the illusion is shattered when you realize that on the PC side of things, Jaguar APUs will be modest processors targeted at tablets, high-end netbooks (ha!), and entry-level laptops.
AMD

In other words, the PlayStation 4's CPU performance isn't likely to rock your socks compared to a PC sporting an AMD Piledriver- or Bulldozer-based processor. It might not even trump a lowly Intel Core i3 processor, especially if Eurogamer's early PlayStation 4 leaks continue to prove accurate and those eight cores are clocked at 1.6GHz.

Comparing the Ps4 or Xbone CPU VS a desktop AMD FX-8300 another cpu that can be had retail for under 100$ or in bulk for around 60$ you'll find in tests it puts in three and half times better performance. The entire problem Assassins Creed is having is as mentioned the CPU in today's consoles is geared towards netbook's and tablet usage, cheap and power efficient. Yes there are a lot of cores but running so slow as to seriously affect things.


There were likely lots of reason to pick a low powered CPU that made sense. You can get away with a smaller console with quieter cooler and decrease manufacturing costs all around. But they might have calculated wrong.

[Dread Not]

And I have never played a PC game at 60 fps and thought "This framerate is really killing the cinematic experience of this game for me. I think I'll lock it to 30." I'm highly skeptical anyone else ever has either.

Depends how distracting you find screen tearing.

Some people might prefer a stable frame rate that syncs with their monitor's refresh to eliminate tearing to a variable one which generates tearing.

Frame rate affects different games differently as well, the more precisely the input has to match what's on screen (competitive FPS, fighting games including spectacle fighters, racing games, and rhythm games) the more important a high frame rate is. For third person games with combat with much looser timings (or just slow combat, Dark Souls works at 30FPS because it's slow and relies on anticipation more than reaction, and many people cope with low FPS in World of Tanks because that's also slow and based on anticipation not reaction) it's generally less important.

I would say that higher framerates are more important on PC as well for the simple reason that you are usually sitting closer to the display, so the effects of frame rate on animation are more noticable than they would be on a screen on the other side of the room. (Also the reason why first person games on PC tend to need wider FoV, because the screen is physically closer)

So y'know, 30FPS on a console third person action game isn't going to have the same effect on the game experience as it would on a PC FPS. Sure, 60FPS would be better for both games, but dropping to 30 is less worse in some situations (and still doesn't push input lag beyond the point that most people start to get distracted by it, though some people still might)

(Also: The Order: 1886 is just Baby's First Bloodborne....)

I agree with all of that. I can understand lowering the framerate for more stable performance, and it certainly isn't essential that I play the Walking Dead or Worms at 60 fps, but my point is I have never been playing a game at a nice smooth 60+ fps and no screen tearing and said "Yuck! Experience ruined! Slow that shit down before I vomit!" That Ubisoft dev seems to think you have to be a loopy, divergent contrarian to want to play AssCreed or Arkham Asylum at 60 fps over 30 fps any day. I would find it perfectly reasonable if a dev said "Our game is a turn based RPG where responsiveness is less important, so we sacrificed 60 fps in favor of fitting more NPC's on screen and a higher resolution to show off our art style."

[TheFeniX]

Slight modification TheFeniX.

Yea, whoa. I modified my post before submitting and didn't pull out your reference because I was to busy ranting. Sorry about that.

There were likely lots of reason to pick a low powered CPU that made sense. You can get away with a smaller console with quieter cooler and decrease manufacturing costs all around. But they might have calculated wrong.

I would go as far to say they definitely did. The lost CPU performance is going to stifle any kind of development for AI and persistent worlds. And since modern dudebro shooters are slowing down (ever so slightly), the branching out is going to be painful when there's limited areas to branch out to.

Ubisoft has already been going on about that and as I've said before, I would definitely trade FPS/resolution for persistence and not dumb-as-rocks AI. The problem is: having to have that trade-off. A trade-off we're now stuck with for at least another 6 years and I've already lived through one console generation with disappointing "console version first" games.

[bilateralrope]

Jim Sterling put up a video about it. One point he adds is that it was AAA publishers who pushed for high definition gaming. The same companies ho are now trying to push against it because they raised consumer expectations higher than they could deliver.

I don't disagree with you. But it seems to be in the same boat as the Kinect: developers are terrified to support it because it cuts into a market that doesn't have it and even if you just add support: why waste money adding said support when you can focus on the 100% of your market that already has a TV/monitor?

How much extra work is required to support VR ?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Aren't MS and Sony gambling on development of programming techniques to offload most of the processing work to the GPU and its unified memory, leaving the CPU for small odds and ends? If those techniques are refined, that should dramatically improve performance on the new consoles in the coming years, right?

[Vendetta]

Jim Sterling put up a video about it. One point he adds is that it was AAA publishers who pushed for high definition gaming. The same companies ho are now trying to push against it because they raised consumer expectations higher than they could deliver.

On the other hand, by never criticising 30fps in games, and always equivocating over 60fps games by mentioning the graphical compromises required to maintain it, reviewers like Jim Sterling are also complicit in causing the drive for shiny over play.

Publishers have chased moar metacritic points (to the extent of bonusing companies on metacritic performance) by doing the things reviewers praised them for and sacrificing the things reviewers didn't care about.

[Mr Bean]

Aren't MS and Sony gambling on development of programming techniques to offload most of the processing work to the GPU and its unified memory, leaving the CPU for small odds and ends? If those techniques are refined, that should dramatically improve performance on the new consoles in the coming years, right?

Pretty much, we've just in the last four years seen the fruits of efforts to take advantage of dual cores after 20+ years of one core one console. Even the Xbox 360 and PS3 both built with multiple cores in each cases most dev's tasked one core with everything and farmed out a task or two for the other cores. Since the PS3 weird 8 cores except only one is a real core and the Xbox 360 cpu power made this possible.

Even today it's not like you see a benefit in your average triple A game between running a duo core celeron vs a quad core haswell. Your speed issues if any come from your GPU unless your pushing past 1080p. As I mentioned earlier in this thread Tom's Hardware ran an exhaustive test to determine how much your CPU mattered VS a GPU. I'll note however the slowest and weakest CPU they tested was at the time at least twice the performance of the Xbone/PS4 Jauger CPU.

[DaveJB]

Aren't MS and Sony gambling on development of programming techniques to offload most of the processing work to the GPU and its unified memory, leaving the CPU for small odds and ends? If those techniques are refined, that should dramatically improve performance on the new consoles in the coming years, right?

It wouldn't surprise me. The Wii U already relies on that technique to offset its CPU essentially being three GameCube CPUs overclocked and slapped together, and the current Radeon design is known for having very strong computational performance, so there's the potential to make use of some GPGPU techniques in games.

In retrospect though, I can't help but wonder whether the original idea might actually have been for the PS4 and Xbone to use the Bulldozer core, only for that plan to be scuppered by its horrid performance-per-watt, and faced with the choice of dragging the old Phenom core out of mothballs (probably in a treble or quad core configuration) or finding a way to preserve the many cores aspect of Bulldozer, AMD chose the latter and went with the Jaguar core.

[Grumman]

How much extra work is required to support VR ?

From what I've read, it's much less forgiving for things we as gamers are generally used to in ordinary games, but will cause motion sickness with VR. Cockpit-based games like flight and mech sims apparently work best, since the cockpit lets your brain cope better with your player character moving when you don't - sort of a reverse of the usual advice to focus on the horizon when you're seasick.

[salm]

How much extra work is required to support VR ?

It really depends.
Some games, like HL2, work pretty good in VR, and apparently weren´t all that much hassle to convert.
Alien Isolation is supposed to work fantastically. I haven´t gotten around to trying it yet, though, so i can´t speak from my own experince.

On the other hand, some games don´t work at all and it is general consensus that games designed specifically for VR are allways going to beat games only adapted for VR.

You basically have to get the Field of View right, you have to make some adjustments to the controls (head tracking), get the game to play at least at constant 75 FPS and remove any kinds of sequences or other things where the game takes control of the camera. If you don´t get this right most people will get sick.

Some games are not good for conversion because of scale issues. The level geometry might be designed too large which works perfectly fine on screen but looks silly in VR.

Besides that there are other things, so all in all there is a whole bunch of stuff you have to consider when making a game for VR. Some games, like HL2, have these properties by chance and can therefore be easily adapted, other games not so much. Some things in some games might need to be a specific way in VR and a different way for monitors making it impossible to make the game good for both displays.

Anyway, if VR gets a large enough market share, developers will be forced to make their games run at 75+ fps if they want to incorporate any kind of VR mode. Seeing that Sony has it´s own VR goggles in the pipeline this might apply to PS4 games as well.
That would be my prefered future because after spending a couple of months in VR playing games and trying demos playing on regular screens is rather, i don´t know, lacking something essential.

[Vendetta]

Anyway, if VR gets a large enough market share, developers will be forced to make their games run at 75+ fps if they want to incorporate any kind of VR mode. Seeing that Sony has it´s own VR goggles in the pipeline this might apply to PS4 games as well.

On the other hand, given all the other restrictions that are present on VR games ("remove any sequences where the game takes control of the camera" basically means "no cutscenes except ones like Half-Life, no transitions, no setpieces") it's more likely that games won't be adapted for VR, they will have to be made specifically for it.

And given that it won't have guaranteed presence in the home, welcome to the next generation of Kinect.

[bilateralrope]

You basically have to get the Field of View right, you have to make some adjustments to the controls (head tracking), get the game to play at least at constant 75 FPS and remove any kinds of sequences or other things where the game takes control of the camera. If you don´t get this right most people will get sick.

FoV seems easy enough if the game already has adjustable FoV. If the game doesn't have adjustable FoV it's already making people sick. Getting the framerate right just means turning down graphical effects until they hit that framerate.

Not taking control of the camera might be the hardest thing for developers to adapt to.

Some games are not good for conversion because of scale issues. The level geometry might be designed too large which works perfectly fine on screen but looks silly in VR.

Besides that there are other things, so all in all there is a whole bunch of stuff you have to consider when making a game for VR. Some games, like HL2, have these properties by chance and can therefore be easily adapted, other games not so much. Some things in some games might need to be a specific way in VR and a different way for monitors making it impossible to make the game good for both displays.

Can all those things can be solved if the game is developed for VR from the start ?

Anyway, if VR gets a large enough market share, developers will be forced to make their games run at 75+ fps if they want to incorporate any kind of VR mode. Seeing that Sony has it´s own VR goggles in the pipeline this might apply to PS4 games as well.
That would be my prefered future because after spending a couple of months in VR playing games and trying demos playing on regular screens is rather, i don´t know, lacking something essential.

What I'm expecting from VR is:
- Console games still only hit 30 FPS when not using VR. Because publishers want shiny screenshots that come from console.
- I doubt VR will come to console
- VR on PC will hit the required framerate. Which means less PC games locked to 30 fps.

[salm]

Can all those things can be solved if the game is developed for VR from the start ?

We´ll see that in the comming months. It´s been solved in a bunch of small/indie games and demos. We´ll see if it´s solvable in "big" games as well. Star Citizen, I guess, is interesting for that.

What I'm expecting from VR is:
- Console games still only hit 30 FPS when not using VR. Because publishers want shiny screenshots that come from console.
- I doubt VR will come to console
- VR on PC will hit the required framerate. Which means less PC games locked to 30 fps.

That´s possible. But I think it will come to consoles. The first (decent) commercially available VR for the masses will be for Smart Phones (Samsung/Oculus Gear VR) and Sony is developing its Morpheus, so I think it will at least be tried on consoles. If we´re unlucky we´ll have to wait for the next generation of consoles. If we´re really unlucky this will kill VR once again.
If there are going to be VR console games it seems likely that at least some of them won´t be locked at 30 FPS when in non VR mode.
What I think is likely is that large studios and publishers wait until a couple of VR titles have promising games and technology. Then they buy them. They´re not going to risk restructuring their available teams.

On the other hand, given all the other restrictions that are present on VR games ("remove any sequences where the game takes control of the camera" basically means "no cutscenes except ones like Half-Life, no transitions, no setpieces") it's more likely that games won't be adapted for VR, they will have to be made specifically for it.

Why not both? Some games will be adapted and some won´t be because it´s not practical to do. Games allready have been successfully adapted so why not in the future? It can also be done the other way round if it´s more feasible. Develop for VR and then adapt for monitors.

And given that it won't have guaranteed presence in the home, welcome to the next generation of Kinect.

I like to think that VR is different because it´s worth so much more than Kinect. The Kinect is a nice gimmick for some things. VR on the other hand is truely astonishing. Just yesterday night for that shameful Eurocup qualification game against Ireland I had two friends over who are the most non gamer prototypes of human beings you could possibly find. After a couple of seconds in VR they were squeeling with joy and horror because they were attacked by some silly polygon ghost. I´ve so far only whitnessed one person who didn´t find it awesome and that was because of a severe case of simulator sickness.
It´s also not confined to a single console like the kinect. It isn´t even confined to gaming. There are plenty of other useful things this can be use for. Therefore I think it´s much more likely to develop a high presence in homes.

[Vendetta]

Why not both? Some games will be adapted and some won´t be because it´s not practical to do. Games allready have been successfully adapted so why not in the future? It can also be done the other way round if it´s more feasible. Develop for VR and then adapt for monitors.

Because you can guarantee everyone has a TV or a monitor, and you can't guarantee everyone will have a VR device and will want to use it for your game. Long viewing/play sessions with something as unobtrusive as 3D glasses already become wearying simply because of the presence of additional hardware, let alone something of greater mass than 3D specs.

And when you consider those rules of adaptation, play some games with a specific eye to instances where they do move the camera out of the player's control, you'll find that it's really common. And it's often used in short sequences to direct player attention to a thing they need to know about for gameplay reasons (eg an introduction to certain capabilities of a newly introduced enemy type), so whole level designs will have to change to put those things in places where the player can reasonably assumed to have been looking already.

There are other things as well which aren't to do with simulation sickness, which again draw comparison to the Kinect. Part of the original pitch of Kinect was that it "removed" the interface layer of the controller and so people didn't have to think about how to do what they wanted the interface to do they just physically did the thing. But the human brain is already very good at removing those interface layers through our long adaptation of tool use. Anyone who has learned to drive a car is already very aware of how the interface layer of wheel and pedals eventually drops away leaving them able to direct the car without thinking about the immediate actions which cause the car to move the way they want.

But if you create a situation where only some of the actions are natural and some are different from the natural norm, eg. directing a character to walk left with your body when you are not actually walking left means you do have to think about how to do the thing. This is why Kinect works really well for dancing games and basically not for anything else. A VR system where some interfaces (totally immersive head tracking, as opposed to head tracking which still takes place on a seperate screen device) are immersive and natural and some are not is going to cause the same disconnects, making players have to think harder about things they want to do than they would otherwise.

I like to think that VR is different because it´s worth so much more than Kinect. The Kinect is a nice gimmick for some things. VR on the other hand is truely astonishing. Just yesterday night for that shameful Eurocup qualification game against Ireland I had two friends over who are the most non gamer prototypes of human beings you could possibly find. After a couple of seconds in VR they were squeeling with joy and horror because they were attacked by some silly polygon ghost. I´ve so far only whitnessed one person who didn´t find it awesome and that was because of a severe case of simulator sickness.

Literally exactly the same thing was said about motion controls (I used Kinect as a shorthand for all of the Wii, Kinect, and Move). That they were a transformative interface which enabled new experiences and drew in people who weren't gamers.

And then it turned out that those transformative experiences were actually a very small range of things, didn't transfer smoothly to game experiences people were already having and motion control was a gimmick after all.

Just like 3D was a gimmick after all, despite having been the future of movies when Avatar came out and now we acknowledge that it's a gimmick with limited effects from which most movies don't benefit and force silly "throw things out of the screen" sequences to remind the audience that they're really watching 3D after all.

Believe me, VR will be another of those things, it will turn out that games have to be built ground up for it to really work properly, and it will further turn out that it only really works with certain types of games, plus not everyone will have it so the actual design effort spent on it will be proportionally smaller than on non-VR experiences which everyone can be guaranteed to have the equipment to run and hence buy.

It will have a few non-game experience applications but none of them will be real mainstream day to day things because they will require other hardware than the VR itself (telepresence via a 3D camera at the other end, for instance).

[salm]

Because you can guarantee everyone has a TV or a monitor, and you can't guarantee everyone will have a VR device and will want to use it for your game. Long viewing/play sessions with something as unobtrusive as 3D glasses already become wearying simply because of the presence of additional hardware, let alone something of greater mass than 3D specs.

I wear the Rift for several hours all the time for example in HL2 and it doesn´t get annoying. A lot of other people don´t seem to have problems with long sessions either.
In games in which you have to move a lot you can have fogging issues from sweat but the weight really isn´t an issue. Never had fogging in normal games yet.
The fogging problem is an engineering problem which I´m sure can be solved so hopefully in the future it will be possible to play sport games.

The best way to compare it might be to compare it to large headphones. Headphones are additional hardware and they don´t bother most people.

The fact that not everybody has one is balanced by the fact that it has a wide range of uses and can not only be used for very specific tasks on specific devices. There is a wider range of incentives to get one than there are incentives for getting a kinect.

And when you consider those rules of adaptation, play some games with a specific eye to instances where they do move the camera out of the player's control, you'll find that it's really common. And it's often used in short sequences to direct player attention to a thing they need to know about for gameplay reasons (eg an introduction to certain capabilities of a newly introduced enemy type), so whole level designs will have to change to put those things in places where the player can reasonably assumed to have been looking already.

Adapting doesn´t mean you can just take it as it is. You have to change certain things. If a game relies too heavily on something that doesn´t work in VR, then obviously it´s not a good candidate for an adaptation. There are plenty of other ways to direct the players eye, though. Moving the camera is very rarely a neccessity.

There are other things as well which aren't to do with simulation sickness, which again draw comparison to the Kinect. Part of the original pitch of Kinect was that it "removed" the interface layer of the controller and so people didn't have to think about how to do what they wanted the interface to do they just physically did the thing. But the human brain is already very good at removing those interface layers through our long adaptation of tool use. Anyone who has learned to drive a car is already very aware of how the interface layer of wheel and pedals eventually drops away leaving them able to direct the car without thinking about the immediate actions which cause the car to move the way they want.

But if you create a situation where only some of the actions are natural and some are different from the natural norm, eg. directing a character to walk left with your body when you are not actually walking left means you do have to think about how to do the thing. This is why Kinect works really well for dancing games and basically not for anything else. A VR system where some interfaces (totally immersive head tracking, as opposed to head tracking which still takes place on a seperate screen device) are immersive and natural and some are not is going to cause the same disconnects, making players have to think harder about things they want to do than they would otherwise.

VR works perfectly fine with an XBox controller. You don´t have to think about walking or moving any more than you have to think when using a monitor. It´s really easy.
It also adds the possibility to rotate your head independantly from your body and to lean, for example, around corners. Both of these are inputs which tend to very clunky when done with a controller or keyboard.
Controller and head tracking function together very smoothly.
I haven´t been able to get hold of a hand tracking controller but it´s supposed to be a lot of fun and it seems that hand tracking blends in smoothly as well.

Literally exactly the same thing was said about motion controls (I used Kinect as a shorthand for all of the Wii, Kinect, and Move). That they were a transformative interface which enabled new experiences and drew in people who weren't gamers.

And then it turned out that those transformative experiences were actually a very small range of things, didn't transfer smoothly to game experiences people were already having and motion control was a gimmick after all.

Eh? The Wii was a huge success and actually did everything you mentioned. Kinect wasn´t. It didn´t work well enough for what it was supposed to do.

Just like 3D was a gimmick after all, despite having been the future of movies when Avatar came out and now we acknowledge that it's a gimmick with limited effects from which most movies don't benefit and force silly "throw things out of the screen" sequences to remind the audience that they're really watching 3D after all.

Indeed. 3D on screens doesn´t add a lot of value. VR on the other hand does.

Believe me, VR will be another of those things, it will turn out that games have to be built ground up for it to really work properly, and it will further turn out that it only really works with certain types of games, plus not everyone will have it so the actual design effort spent on it will be proportionally smaller than on non-VR experiences which everyone can be guaranteed to have the equipment to run and hence buy.

It will have a few non-game experience applications but none of them will be real mainstream day to day things because they will require other hardware than the VR itself (telepresence via a 3D camera at the other end, for instance).

There´s nothing to turn out. Games have been successfully adapted for VR by companies and/or modders.
BTW the range of games that work in VR is interesting. It sounds absurd but there´s a japanese top down shooter called Suwako-chan which has been adapted to VR and oddly it is more fun in VR than on a screen.

Have you ever tried a set of VR goggles? A lot of people, myself included, are very sceptical before they try it but love it afterwards.
At the moment it´s of course speculative to claim that VR will or will not take off. But after seeing what can be done I speculate heavily in the direction of success rather than failure.

[Vendetta]

I wear the Rift for several hours all the time for example in HL2 and it doesn´t get annoying. A lot of other people don´t seem to have problems with long sessions either.

And other people get headaches and sickness from even relatively short sessions.

If even some of the audience is not able to comfortably use the product for a worthwhile length of time, it automatically limits the potential market.

The fact that not everybody has one is balanced by the fact that it has a wide range of uses and can not only be used for very specific tasks on specific devices. There is a wider range of incentives to get one than there are incentives for getting a kinect.

But much less wide than the range of incentives to get a television or general purpose PC which can also play games (and hence monitor). Anyone who has bought a game console or a PC is potentially part of your audience for a game which does not use VR equipment, but the audience for a game which does is inherently smaller.

Adapting doesn´t mean you can just take it as it is. You have to change certain things. If a game relies too heavily on something that doesn´t work in VR, then obviously it´s not a good candidate for an adaptation. There are plenty of other ways to direct the players eye, though. Moving the camera is very rarely a neccessity.

Yes, but you would either have to change the product significantly only when used with VR (which essentially means a different edition of the game, splitting your skus) or you have to change the whole product for the sake of a peripheral that doesn't apply to 100% of its potential audience.

Eh? The Wii was a huge success and actually did everything you mentioned. Kinect wasn´t. It didn´t work well enough for what it was supposed to do.

The Wii was a huge success at selling Wiis. It was not a huge suiccess at selling software for Wiis. Lots of people bought Wiis, played the packed in stuff and never bought anything else for it because it turns out it wasn't good at anything else. If you look back critically at the Wii's USP, motion control, very few games really use it in a non-gimmicky fashion.

The Kinect was the same but with the added burden of not being universal across the userbase. Every Wii game developed could assume the existence of the remote and nunchuck, but an Xbox game couldn't assume the existence of kinect and so it was downplayed. Likewise coming PC and console games can't assume the existence of VR and so unless market penetration is significantly over 50% (and probably closer to 75-80%) they simply will not bother with it because it does not make economic sense to spend money adapting their game for VR when so few people have it.

Hence like Kinect it will end up with a subset of games specifically designed to use it, a few half hearted attempts to include it that feel gimmicky, and it will go the way of all the other gimmicks.

[DaveJB]

The Wii did sell tons of software... it was just Nintendo's own software, so in that regard it was really no different from the GameCube, apart from having roughly 5x the install base. But yeah, the lesson learned from the Wii is that these new and exciting gameplay methods can be popular, if it's both accessible and reasonably priced, albeit with no guarantee of long-term success. And the lesson from the Xbone (and to a lesser extent, the 3DS) is that you can't rely solely on having some new feature and hope gamers will overlook the other flaws of your system.

[Vendetta]

The Wii did sell tons of software... it was just Nintendo's own software, so in that regard it was really no different from the GameCube, apart from having roughly 5x the install base.

Even then though the pack-ins hugely overwhelm software people had to actually buy. Of the top ten selling Wii games six of them came with some kind of extra plastic gubbins (balance board, extra remote, motionplus) or the console itself.

[salm]

And other people get headaches and sickness from even relatively short sessions.
If even some of the audience is not able to comfortably use the product for a worthwhile length of time, it automatically limits the potential market.

That doesn´t seem to stem from wearing a device, though, but from simulator sickness. That´s a problem that needs to be taken care of and it looks like it´s being addressed with pretty high priority. The new version of the rift had a lot less problems than the old version due to improved head tracking, better resolution and a couple of firmware improvements.
But if motion sickness remains a problem then VR is unlikely to succeed.

But much less wide than the range of incentives to get a television or general purpose PC which can also play games (and hence monitor). Anyone who has bought a game console or a PC is potentially part of your audience for a game which does not use VR equipment, but the audience for a game which does is inherently smaller.

Why compare all game systems without VR to game systems with VR? If you have a PC game and want to extend it´s user base to PS3 and XBox you have to port it.
If you have a non VR PC game and want to extend it´s user base to VR PC gamers you have to port it.
I think a lot of people who are not interested in non VR games will be interested in VR games.

Yes, but you would either have to change the product significantly only when used with VR (which essentially means a different edition of the game, splitting your skus) or you have to change the whole product for the sake of a peripheral that doesn't apply to 100% of its potential audience.

That´s just not true. Some games can be easily ported as shown by Half Life 2 or Skyrim.

Even then though the pack-ins hugely overwhelm software people had to actually buy. Of the top ten selling Wii games six of them came with some kind of extra plastic gubbins (balance board, extra remote, motionplus) or the console itself.

So it actually did sell a lot of software and even managed to sell a bunch of peripherals?
How do the sales compare to some other console? The Xbox 360 or the PS 3? Do you have good numbers? I can´t seem to find reliable numbers.


In the end I agree with you that market penetration is the key to success. Since VR can be used for a wide range of things besides gaming, adds incredible amounts of value to your computer system and can be produced pretty cheaply I think that it will reach this market penetration sooner or later.
If it doesn´t within the next couple of years feel free to mock my fanboyism.
And go try it somewhere if you get the chance. It´s really cool.

[AniThyng]

People who are not too interested in gaming or are only casually interested or worse, consider it a unproductive use of time may object to a level of involvement that involves putting on a mini helmet, which is much more immersive and therefore isolating than merely sitting on the couch with a controller.

[salm]

Yeah, that´s what they all say before trying it.

A 3D graphics company who was a customer of mine demonstrates VR to its customers for potential future projects. They say that a lot of people, esspecially women are concerned about their hair getting messed up and it´s apparently not allways easy to get them to try it. But as soon as they´re wearing the goggles all of these concerns are usuall gone.

That´s something that makes it completely different from Kinect and similar things. The Kinect looked awesome in the advertisments but as soon as you got it and tried it you immediatly noticed what a piece of junk it was. With VR people can´t really imagine how great it is, don´t expect all that much and are then blown away.

[DaveJB]

How do the sales compare to some other console? The Xbox 360 or the PS 3? Do you have good numbers? I can´t seem to find reliable numbers.

As of when the PS4 and Xbone launched last year, most estimates pegged the Wii at a little over 100m units, and the 360 and PS3 at about 80m apiece. Of the latter two however, Sony ended up making far less profit thanks to the PS3's obscene R&D&P costs, while the 360 did a fair bit better comparatively speaking (MS lost quite a bit of money through the RRoD fiasco, but apparently made up for it by selling a fuckton of Kinects).

[salm]

How do the sales compare to some other console? The Xbox 360 or the PS 3? Do you have good numbers? I can´t seem to find reliable numbers.

As of when the PS4 and Xbone launched last year, most estimates pegged the Wii at a little over 100m units, and the 360 and PS3 at about 80m apiece. Of the latter two however, Sony ended up making far less profit thanks to the PS3's obscene R&D&P costs, while the 360 did a fair bit better comparatively speaking (MS lost quite a bit of money through the RRoD fiasco, but apparently made up for it by selling a fuckton of Kinects).

Ah, sorry, I meant sales for games.
I read that there are over 100 Wii games that soled more than a million units but that was on a rather unreliable website.
Even if it´s true I found no way to compare this to game sales of other consoles.

[DaveJB]

If you discount Wii Sports (included with the system) and Wii Play (essentially a Wii Remote with a few half-arsed games thrown in), the Wii's total software sales as of earlier this year are around 770 million, according to Nintendo themselves. The PS3, by comparison, passed the 600 million game mark two-and-a-half years ago, so it's almost certainly blown past the Wii by now. Can't find any reliable sources for the 360.

The Wii actually did have quite a lot of high-selling games according to this list (yeah, Wikipedia, I know), but the PS3 and presumably 360's sales are divided across a much larger number of games, whereas Mario Kart Wii and New Super Mario Bros. Wii alone account for over 10% of all the Wii's software sales between them.