After the newness wears off you are stuck with the practicality of it. Is the consumer market going to be big enough to warrant spending resources on developing a game for it?

I think you are neglecting the "Apple factor", as we sometimes call it.

Is the market going to be small? Most likely. But it's a small market wherein every single member can afford to blow $600-$1,600 on novelty hardware.

That's the kind of market I want to be selling things to...

@swiftcoder

No doubt, but that still is ignoring the fact that in order to sell to that niche market you have to blow $600-$1,600 yourself then blow even more for resources to make a game that may or may not be a hit for that market. It just seems, to me anyways, the risk far outweighs the reward at this moment in time.

You certainly aren't going to get any AAA titles to run on [PS|VR], because those struggle to run at 30 fps on 720p/1080p when you need 75 fps or higher at a potentially higher resolution.

Not existing, non-VR titles, no... but future AAA titles, sure.
Some AAA games already choose to ship at 1080p 60Hz as an up-front design choice. Others choose 30Hz and/or 720p (or in-between values). This choice is usually made at the start of a project, and all other tech decisions afterwards are made to meet this constraint.

Every PSVR game has to choose 120Hz and dual 1080p as a forced design choice, and then works out the rest from there. Yes, that means your shaders have to be 4x or even 8x as fast... That's a design choice that VR games will deal / are dealing with. PSVR games will have simpler and/or more static scenes, at least to begin with, compared to current PS4 titles.

Is [Oculus CV1's resolution] high enough to get rid of the damnable screen door effect?

It won't go away entirely until we get 8k+ monitors per eye
IMHO DK1 had horrible screen dooring, then DK2 actually eliminated strict "screen door" effect by using rotated pixels, but still had quite visible pixels (which is pretty much the same problem). I only had a quick demo, but my impression is that the improvement from DK2->CV1 is about the same as the improvement from DK1->DK2 (about 2x better!).

Sony has a history of grand ideas falling flat. PSP and the UMD format, PS EyeToy, and PS Move.

Despite being a flop, they still sold something like 15 million PS Move / PS Eye's, and so far over 1 million PS Camera's for the PS4.
The PSVR will cost "less than the price of the console", so you'll probably be able to buy a brand new PS4 + controller + Camera + PSVR, all for less than the cost of a Rift/Vive. It will have a decent catalogue of games with known-good performance (no PC spec issues, so dev's can optimize for a single known GPU and audio DSP), and will be designed by a company that's made HMD's, optics (SLR's), displays, and audio equipment for a long time, and knows how to sell a product to regular people's lounge rooms It's certainly going to be the product that takes VR and pushes it mainstream / mass-market, unlike the early-adopter tactic of Rift/Vive this year.

if I want to make a game for the PS4 I'm going to have to pay Sony some moneys, but if I wanted to make a VR game then I can load up my copy of Unity, make the game, throw it on the interwebs and not pay them a dime.

Sure, if you're a AAA dev that's how it goes.
If you're an indie, making games on Unity, then Sony pays you money, showers you in dev-kits and sends you as many PSVR's as you need, while also offering free tech support and QA.
I would love Oculus to treat me the way that Sony does

FWIW, Valve are also giving out free devkits so far, instead of asking devs to fund the development of them.

in order to sell to that niche market you have to blow $600-$1,600 yourself then blow even more for resources to make a game that may or may not be a hit for that market. It just seems, to me anyways, the risk far outweighs the reward at this moment in time.

That's between a day or three's wages for one of your programmers... not really a big business expense...

Despite being a flop, they still sold something like 15 million PS Move / PS Eye's

I wonder how many of that is from people actually buying the peripheral as opposed to those who bought a game that included them. I bought Eye of Judgment thinking it had a an option to not use the camera, still have the camera and not had it plugged in since I tried EoJ. I grew up loving to play Monster Rancher Battle Card (still have the PSX disc) and assumed EoJ had an option to do it like that, but when I realized it forced you to use the camera and playing cards I stopped playing it.

That's between a day or three's wages for one of your programmers... not really a big business expense...

Not everyone is a paid programmer nor is every indie a paid programmer. My daily job is taking care of my wife and son, others work full-time at grocery stores or other "low-end jobs" while working on their dedicated projects a few hours a day. Others quit working, start patreons and work full time on their projects. They can't afford to develop or even buy one as a gamer.

However, for people were paying attention to the hardware market the last few years, it should have been fairly apparent that the $350 mark was a pipedream. The DK1 came close to being on budget, but by the DK2 they were already cutting corners to keep the cost down (and it's likely they took a loss on the hardware, regardless). With the further upgrades to the commercial unit, there was no way in hell they were bringing it in for that.

Once there are a body of games being developed for VR, they can probably start subsidising the hardware with game sales, but at this early stage, it is what it is.

Oh sure - if you know what the thing is you're not surprised. If all you're doing is listening to the marketing you're going to get sticker shock (which is on Oculus, who could have messaged better about it, but didn't, because marketing is hard).

That's not what I meant. I wanted to wait for the Vive to compare the two. I don't expect it to be cheaper.

I don't mind paying US$600 for a quality VR solution. I REALLY object to them tacking another $100 before shipping because... I dunno, they hate NZ or something? And as for $140 for shipping... unless John Carmack is delivering it by hand, that is completely fucking extortionate.

While I appreciate that in a lot of cases non-US countries get screwed by the conversion, I don't think that's what's going on here. It reads to me that they're getting hit by local taxes and are likely using insured shipping (even US shipping I hear is upwards of $50).

But I don't work for them or know where each dollar is going, so it's just speculation.

Is it high enough to get rid of the damnable screen door effect?

From my personal experience with the Vive devkit (which I am pretty sure uses the exact same resolution) the effect is not eliminated if you're looking for it and squinting, but it is minimized to the point of being unnoticeable in normal play and, more importantly, you can actually read text.

I think you are neglecting the "Apple factor", as we sometimes call it.

Is the market going to be small? Most likely. But it's a small market wherein every single member can afford to blow $600-$1,600 on novelty hardware.

That's the kind of market I want to be selling things to...

Yeah - I think this will help.

You can either put your game on Steam, iOS, Android and the like where it will be lost in a giant sea of free-to-play mediocrity, hoping you snag enough "whales" to stay afloat.

Or you can be one of 100 games that comes out for the hardware this year for customers with proven disposable income.

You certainly aren't going to get any AAA titles to run on [PS|VR], because those struggle to run at 30 fps on 720p/1080p when you need 75 fps or higher at a potentially higher resolution.

Not existing, non-VR titles, no... but future AAA titles, sure.
Some AAA games already choose to ship at 1080p 60Hz as an up-front design choice. Others choose 30Hz and/or 720p (or in-between values). This choice is usually made at the start of a project, and all other tech decisions afterwards are made to meet this constraint.

Every PSVR game has to choose 120Hz and dual 1080p as a forced design choice, and then works out the rest from there. Yes, that means your shaders have to be 4x or even 8x as fast... That's a design choice that VR games will deal / are dealing with. PSVR games will have simpler and/or more static scenes, at least to begin with, compared to current PS4 titles.

Yeah, which is kind of my point.

Most large AAA companies are more concerned about how good a screenshot looks than how it plays, and consumers have proven they will accept low resolution low framerate games if they look pretty enough (The Order 1888 notwithstanding).

Devs who design with it in mind, that basically start with the expectation of rending 75fps per eye or higher, will work, but what graphical sacrifices are going to have to be made to hit it? And will people care enough? See Halo 5 for how people complained about loss of split screen in order to hit 60fps (because the dev didn't want to sacrifice graphical fidelity to render a split screen).

Maybe the real solution here is to double-down on non-realistic rendering styles to make up for the loss of horsepower. Because customers time and time again have proven they don't care why one game looks "worse" than another one, just that it does.

Maybe the real solution here is to double-down on non-realistic rendering styles to make up for the loss of horsepower. Because customers time and time again have proven they don't care why one game looks "worse" than another one, just that it does.

Have you tried the Vive photogrammetry demos? They look "realistic" because they're basically photographs, but are super cheap to render (you could draw them with D3D7 level shading!). One local indie studio here is making a Vive/Rift/PSVR game, and they're doing their environments this way, as it gives them really good realistic graphics for as cheap as possible. Of course the downside is that all shading is baked (so no dynamic lighting, and specular will look wrong if you can move the camera far...), and your game levels must exist in the real world first... Not a good fit everywhere, but I expect to see a bit of it in early VR titles.

Devs who design with it in mind, that basically start with the expectation of rending 75fps per eye or higher, will work, but what graphical sacrifices are going to have to be made to hit it? And will people care enough?

I imagine that PSVR games, and curated Oculus games will have 120Hz and 90Hz (respectively) as a mandatory compliance checklist item - i.e. you don't ship or don't get curated if you aren't hitting that maximum performance benchmark. The gatekeepers will be very intent on minimizing sim sickness during this launch period.

Have you tried the Vive photogrammetry demos? They look "realistic" because they're basically photographs, but are super cheap to render (you could draw them with D3D7 level shading!). One local indie studio here is making a Vive/Rift/PSVR game, and they're doing their environments this way, as it gives them really good realistic graphics for as cheap as possible. Of course the downside is that all shading is baked (so no dynamic lighting, and specular will look wrong if you can move the camera far...), and your game levels must exist in the real world first... Not a good fit everywhere, but I expect to see a bit of it in early VR titles.

Yeah, a few of our artists have talked about and messed around with photogrammetry, though it's too limited for the stuff we do. It might work, but it tends to produce higher texture memory requirements then less photo-realistic stuff. (Even though the geometry and shaders can be simplified)

Haven't tried the Vive demos for it though, was using a friend's hardware and they basically ran through a couple of the Valve demos. Was reasonably impressed by the robot repair one.

I imagine that PSVR games, and curated Oculus games will have 120Hz and 90Hz (respectively) as a mandatory compliance checklist item - i.e. you don't ship or don't get curated if you aren't hitting that maximum performance benchmark. The gatekeepers will be very intent on minimizing sim sickness during this launch period.

Easier to do on a PS4 where the hardware is fixed, less easy on a PC, so hopefully the message of "no, really, you need a high-end PC for this" can be spread quickly. I don't really see them doing something on the level of preventing download/execution based on hardware detection though.

But yeah. Very important time for VR. Which is kind of why I'm glad Oculus decided to go with a $600 price point rather than sacrificing something to get a lower price point. Economies of scale and improved production methods can bring the price down later, once more people have VR-capable hardware (and there's more stuff to actually DO with VR).

Also going to be interesting to see how this interacts with AR as well.

Now makes me want to try to put an oculus on over a hololens

Google cardboard gives me a headache, so unfortunately the Oculus will probably do the same.

Easier to do on a PS4 where the hardware is fixed, less easy on a PC, so hopefully the message of "no, really, you need a high-end PC for this" can be spread quickly.

They're seelling an "Oculus ready" certification for new PC's - there's only 3 that have it so far. They also have a downloadable tool to check if you meet the minimum requirements - none of the PC's in our office do! Basically you neee to have one of NVidia's best two cards atm, at a minimum. That spec is what they'll be curatibg for, so devs have a fairly limited set of configurations to optimize for.

Google cardboard gives me a headache, so unfortunately the Oculus will probably do the same.

There's likely a difference between optics and electronics that cost literally a few dollars and the high end. Google cardboard is like the reading glasses that you buy from a supermarket instead of an optometrist :)

It occurs to me that actually Sony could add "VR" support to every single game on the PS4 rather easily, depending on the specs of the breakout box.

Basically, if the breakout box is powerful enough to render a simple scene at 75+ FPS at whatever resolution their headset supports without any assistance from the main console, they basically can just make a VR theater mode. The PS4 already supports streaming, so then you just "stream" the PS4 game to a texture that the breakout box renders as the large "screen". This would be great for people who want a theater or big-screen experience for their games, but don't necessarily have a big screen TV in their house.

And, of course, if the game or movie supports 3d already, then they can easily render the game or move to each eye to provide the 3d effect.