VR isn't ready for a "must-play" experience | Opinion
What will it take for VR to grow beyond its niche status and become an important commercial pillar of the games industry? It's quite literally a billion dollar question – many billions, in fact.
Ever since Oculus kickstarted the current VR market ten years ago, there has been a fairly steady progression for the technology, with improvements in hardware and software alike coming at regular intervals.
The addressable audience has grown too, but for the most part that growth has been linear. Meta's range of Quest headsets are probably the best-selling devices in the space, selling around 20 million devices cumulatively. That's good growth, but it's not breakout growth – it shows VR becoming a larger niche, not VR breaking out of niche status entirely.
Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé pointed recently to one key factor that VR might need to grow beyond a niche market – what he described as a "must-play" experience. He shared a chart from Statista, showing their forecast that VR will achieve 1.7% global market penetration by 2027, compared to 51.3% penetration for video game hardware overall, and commented that until must-play experiences are available, the chart's title – asking if VR was destined to remain a niche – would be true.
The point here is not to litigate the question of Statista's forecast here – they're very good at what they do, but I'm sure everyone knows that there are major limitations to the accuracy of this kind of prediction. Even a market forecast 12 months out is tricky, and that's a time period in which we have a good idea of products that will launch and general consumer and economic trends.
Forecasting five years into the future for a rapidly evolving market like VR is subject to
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
