But Why VR?: The Fallacy of Inevitability
Very few things are impossible, but many are highly improbable
VR has been a hot topic as of late, and I think it is telling that I’ve had more use cases for VR as an instructive example than as a leisure or business device. Today won’t be any different.
It remains my most consistently correct “new year” prediction that, every year, VR will continue to struggle to find footing. It is a bit of a lay-up: VR has been my go-to example on where conceptions of the gaming industry tend to go astray, if not the future of the commercial internet among Metaverse boosters. In both cases the problem is that not a lot of people really use VR for gaming or otherwise, and those that do tend to not stick around for long. And yet, we are made to believe that it’s always “just a few years away” from mainstream adoption.
Whatever you believe mainstream adoption to mean, most empirical signals will point to us being quite a bit further out than a “few years away” for VR. When discussing the trajectory of VR in gaming I often reference PC gaming platform Steam’s “Hardware and Software Survey” - who better to adopt something like VR than Steam users, who disproportionately use specialized technology for PC gaming and where gaming is the most common commercial use of the technology? I quoted results from October 2021 in my book, which noted that a mere 1.85% of Steam users had some kind of VR device. Over a year later, the January 2023 release puts this number at…2.19%. The classically trained survey statistician in me will remind you that this is not necessarily growth, but much more likely to be sampling variance, with the strong implication being that usage has essentially been flat over this period.
Which begs the question: What is going wrong, or at least not right, with VR? The debate was reginted recently in the latest essay by Metaverse taste-maker Matt Ball, which poses the question of “how many XR [a catch-all term for virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality] winters must come and go before a spring actually leads to summer?” Throughout, Mr. Ball does what he does best: A thorough (and occasionally bit-by-bit) accounting of what makes this technology so difficult to get right for mass adoption. The reasoning is cogent: From a consumer technology standpoint, XR devices have to do what a gaming console does with enormous disadvantages to weight, processing power, form factor, and innumerable other considerations given that these devices must be worn.
VR is thus in the unenviable position of competing with devices that have the same relative functionality (game consoles or PCs that can convincingly portray 3D worlds) with severe limitations to form factor. The perennial problem for VR is that the core functionality provided (better immersion) has yet to offset the limitations which extract costs in the form of noticeably reduced fidelity, cost, cumbersome wires, glitchy UI/software, lack of content, or generalized physical discomfort.
We are a mere few weeks away from the latest attempt for VR to gain a foothold in living rooms. Playstation will be launching the VR2 in the next few weeks, a $550 VR peripheral for the $500 PS5 game system (Strike 1: Cost). Bloomberg broke the story that Playstation has ramped back production in advance of the launch (a fact which Playstation has refuted…sort of), which faced early criticisms for its lack of backwards compatibility with the PSVR1 library of games (Strike 2: Content). Though the headset has some of the best optics available in consumer-grade VR (playing into one of Sony’s superpowers as a major manufacturer of video screens), it comes at the expense of a form factor which requires physical connection to the Playstation 5 console (Strike 3: cumbersome wires).
Where does this leave the future of VR 2023? Honestly…not much different than last year. Or the year before. Though the technology is improving incrementally, these increments have not meaningfully offset the immense drawbacks.
Ball waves some of this problem away with the claim that VR is still early as far as consumer technology goes. By focusing on XR more generally, Ball pins the onset of the adoption cycle around 2010 (roughly when Magic Leap was founded), meaning “modern'' XR has been in the hands of consumers for less time than mobile phones. In the case of VR specifically, this timeline is misleading - one could just as easily note that VR has been around since at least 1990, when commercial experiences were pretty widely available (hell, pending your definition, you could go as far back as the 1950s or 1960s). While the technology has improved immensely from the days of, say, the Virtual Boy, consumer penetration has not. It’s almost as if the technology in the abstract isn’t the problem.
This leads into my biggest ongoing criticism of Ball’s work (both here and in his blockbuster book, The Metaverse). He notes in his essay that “Technology is not a “‘when’ - let alone ‘when will X be mainstream’ - but a ‘when is what, used by whom, why, and to what end.’” While I broadly agree with this premise, we tend to fall short on the most important part: Few do the “what” of technology better than Ball, but I’m always left wanting for the “why” (which, in my mind, also makes the “whom” and “to what end” redundant). As it pertained to the Metaverse, the evidence Ball put forward for its eventuality was scarce relative to the exhaustive accounting of the technological barriers - mostly it amounted to “we are gravitating towards media which is more like real life.” Even if one buys into that (not entirely unreasonable) argument, it hardly seems like enough “why” to motivate the profound change in consumer behaviors that the Metaverse requires. While few would describe their experiences on the current web as all that “embodied” and only occasionally “3D,” we do carry shards of glass in our pockets which more or less contain the sum of all human knowledge, which sure is convenient and useful.
The problems with VR, both as depicted within Ball’s essay and among generalized consumer user cases, fall along similar lines, albeit with “why” justification that is getting more strained by claiming that “history does show […] over time, these devices get closer to our face, while also more natural and immersive in interface, leading to increased usage too.” I’m no statistician, but this feels like a textbook example of “causality does not imply causation” - screens got closer to our faces because of an ongoing desire to consume more media through screens in general, rather than any inherent benefit to the proximity of the screen to face in general. In fact, the quality of said experience has been significantly degraded on these smaller, more proximate screens, but we use them because it’s convenient.
The broader issue at play is one which has plagued much of the thinking around more future-looking and buzzy technology, whether it is VR, Metaverse, Blockchain, or even generative AI: The assumption that these technologies are inevitable. If you believe that any given technology is inevitable, then the “why” of the technology is irrelevant. Unfortunately, if you believe that any given technology is inevitable the “what” of it suffers often for lack of the “why.” The reality is, no matter how intellectually or economically invested in a given technology you may be, consumer adoption is fickle, non-linear, and relatively unpredictable - anyone who claims to know otherwise is either improbably lucky or naive.
Returning to the more narrow field of VR, the “why” of VR is when this technology goes beyond merely matching, but superseding an array of devices and use cases beyond what current VR headsets provide - Ball references the iPhone as the textbook example, which combined an MP3, phone, and “internet communicator” in a way that more satisfying than any one of these devices in isolation. From this blueprint, VR has a way to go given lofty competition from video game consoles (and, arguably, the iPhone). Alternatively, the content exclusive through VR rises to the quality and quantity that sufficiently overrides the limitations in current tech. The exclusively-VR debut of Half Life: Alyx, the first installment in 13 years within the legendary Half Life franchise, reportedly added a million VR users to Steam.
Examples such as Alyx are rare (notably, the PSVR2 will debut with a VR-exclusive entry to the popular Horizon franchise) because of the stunningly obvious “chicken and egg” problem outlined above - quality content tends to be made for mass adoption of a given media technology, but the adoption of the media technology is contingent on the tech. However, if we assume somewhere between 130-150M MAUs for Steam in January, the million VR users that Alyx brought in would be equivalent to about a third of the install base on the platform. Comparatively small numbers, but instructive: A struggling technology was given a “why” that could not be met adequately elsewhere.
VR is not the inevitable future of gaming no more than the Metaverse, Blockchain, or generative AI are inevitable for the future of our technology: No matter how much we might believe in these technologies, it is irrelevant - each will live or die on the basis that consumers are given a compelling “why” to invest in these technologies. And yet, much of the discourse around any one of these technologies tends to focus exclusively on “what.” We assume the inevitability of VR because it is a technology which advances the immersive power of video games, whereas the player experience tells a considerably more nuanced story. I often note that understanding consumer adoption of video games is a useful window to understanding consumer adoption of technology more generally - in this view, more is at stake in the discussion of VR than just a potential entryway to the Metaverse.
For technologies that have failed to gain mass adoption for about as long as the iPhone has been around (cryptocurrencies, as the most popular consumer experience for blockchain), or those that are already believed to be at least a decade away (Metaverse), falling into the “what vs. why” trap is particularly onerous and is already (arguably) a common theme for discussions of the tech. In both cases, continuing on this path will position both technologies in good company of just being “a few years away” in perpetuity.