Did Bethesda miss the boat?

[prinyo]

 

 

 ... since the tech, although existing isn't that much popular or readily available like the common household entertainment appliance that is the gaming console....and PC...

[ ... ]

for now, it's just a novelty...

 

Yep. This is "the chicken and the egg" problem every 1st gen consumer technology faces - there are no users because there is no content and there is no content because there are no users. 

 

Facebook's (Oculus) way to deal with this is to invest into the development of exclusive games, "subsidizing" VR games. Facebook has invested $500m into content creation. Including paying the license for Unreal and giving developers money to create games for Oculus. 

This is highly controversial as it introduces the marketing-based exclusivity that exists in the console gaming into the PC space. But this is not the topic of the discussion here. 

 

Vive's approach (HTC and Valve) is to open the software and hardware platforms as much as possible. At the moment everybody can publish a VR game on Steam. There is no Greenlight or anything similar for VR titles. You simply email Steam and tell them you want to publish a VR game and they send you an AppID. The positive aspect of this that there is more content and more freedom to experiment. The negative is that there is a lot of lower quality content. As you can see from the link this is also highly controversial. 

On the hardware side there are lots of companies (500 companies says Valve) working on products  that can be  used with the Vive's tracking system. 

 

And then there is VorpX that gets better and better in allowing you to play flat games in VR. I'm quite happy with it for SKyrim and the Fallout games. It is probably a good compromise for the people who want to feel present in the in-game world, but also want to preserve the 3rd person connection with their player character.

 

 

I think in the next 2-3 years we can expect the quality VR content to come in form of VR support for mainstream flat AAA games, similar to Elite Dangerous and VR ports of existing games - like the highly anticipated Fallout 4 port Bethesda is planning to release shortly (first half of 2017). 

 

As you say: "maybe in 4-5 years will see more goggleheads..." There will be no TES6 in the next few years according to Bethesda, so speculating if "the next Skyrim" will be VR or not is pointless as they themselves don't know that yet. 

 

Added: 

An interesting video explaining what was in the demo of the FO4 VR version that Bethesda was showing last year.