Editorial: VR goes extinct (again)

VR goes extinct (again)

          The game industry never seems to turn off. Day and night, new stuff is announced for games of all shape and size. This week saw some big trailers and details about the upcoming sequel to Destiny, EA has confirmed that they will be announcing their next Battlefront game at Star Wars Celebration, and a lot of attention has been given to Splatoon 2 after the recent beta test among other things.

          With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that sometimes an update on a forthcoming game will be missed every once in a while. Back in February Eurogamer reported that Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming VR title based on the beloved sci-fi franchise, would be missing it’s March launch date and had been delayed until the end of May. This news flew under the radar of nearly everybody, with most major gaming news outlets not even reporting the delay. I myself had no idea it had occurred until I wondered what the hell had happened to the game and properly researched it.

          So why did this happen? This game got a pretty positive reception at Ubisoft’s last E3, and as a big Trek fan I personally was pretty excited to see how it would turn out.

          The answer came to me pretty quickly: the game itself wasn’t the reason why nobody seemed to care anymore. It was the cause of the platform Bridge Crew was releasing on.

          The return of virtual reality to the gaming market was a huge deal last year, so much so that I got extremely sick of hearing about it by the time 2016 came to a close. Everybody was debating who had the best VR hardware, whether Vive or Oculus or PlayStation VR was the best of the best when it came to simulating. YouTubers who’d gotten their hands on one of the devices early made videos featuring the stuff en masse in hopes of garnering some extra views from those interested in the products. PlayStation VR especially became one of the hottest tech gifts that holiday season, with many people ignoring the steep price point and buying one for themselves.

          Fast-forward to March of 2017 and all talk of VR in the gaming scene seems to have vanished entirely. How did the hottest topic of last year suddenly fall off the face of the Earth!?

          Well, there are quite a few reasons why the VR experiment of 2016 completely blew up in everybody’s face. The first and most significant was the price. Looking at Best Buy Canada right now, the cheapest headset is the PlayStation VR, which comes in at $550. For comparison, Best Buy Canada will also sell you a brand new Nintendo Switch bundled with Zelda: Breath of the Wild for $480, saving you a full $70 that you can use to buy a second game of your choosing. PlayStation VR also has a bundle that includes the tech demo PlayStation VR Worlds, but that bumps the price up to a monstrous $600, which is frankly way too much for what the headset and included tech demo give you.

          There’s also the fact that if you just want to use the VR to experience what it feels like, you have alternatives like Google Cardboard and similar products that only cost you around $30 at most. If you’re just going to use the VR to look at a 3D aquarium or rollercoaster, you might as well save yourself $500 to spend on something you’ll actually use.

          Considering PlayStation VR, there’s also the concern that Sony tends to drop anything under the PlayStation brand that underperforms. Remember PlayStation TV? Or the PlayStation Move? What about the PlayStation Vita? All of them Sony products that didn’t sell as much as they hoped and were left behind before the next year was over. With the only forthcoming major VR release currently on the calendar being Star Trek in May, I think it doesn’t take a genius to say that PlayStation VR will be joining the club very soon.

          And, of course, there’s the issue that VR doesn’t have any real headliner titles, and the ones it does support can be played just as well on a TV screen. Resident Evil 7 was advertised a lot as a VR title, but I didn’t really see anyone playing with it for more than a little bit before switching to the standard mode. PlayStation VR Worlds hasn’t exactly received glowing reviews, forthcoming releases like Golem have vanished entirely, and I can’t remember the last time I heard someone talking about Batman VR or Eagle Flight.

          Frankly, I’m not surprised that Sony seems to be pushing VR under the rug and the companies entirely based on the stuff seemed to have more or less disappeared. Microsoft’s HoloLens project hasn’t been seen since spring of last year, so god knows what’s going on with that. This is exactly why I was hesitant to support VR last year when everyone was falling head-over-heels for the concept. With Star Trek: Bridge Crew being what seems to be the final major release for Playstation VR, I think that in a few years we’ll look back on the concept the same way we do Guitar Hero peripherals and motion controls.

Song of the Week

          Terra’s Theme – Final Fantasy VI