Palmer Luckey, Oculus‘ founder, believes the technology is far from making VR mainstream.

Luckey shared his thoughts in a blog post, and already the title is thoughtful: „Free isn’t cheap enough.” He thinks hardware sales can’t judge the VR‘s success, calling them a „meaningless metric.” Instead, the engagement should be tracked, and by that, he means „the number of people logging in and spending money each week.”

He thinks the recent cheap VR hardware experiments show that there is interest in purchasing them, but on long-term, the products aren’t being used, and there’s no „investing in the software ecosystem” either. It applies to those who either get the hardware for free or for the cardboard devices, „fulfilling their ultimate destiny on the back shelf of a closet don’t do much for the VR industry,” according to Luckey, who blames it on the „quality of experience.”

„I want to take this a step further and make a bold claim: No existing or imminent VR hardware is good enough to go truly mainstream, even at a price of $0.00. You could give a Rift+PC to every single person in the developed world for free, and the vast majority would cease to use it in a matter of weeks or months. I know this from seeing the results of large-scale real-world market testing, not just my imagination […] Free is still not cheap enough for most people, because the cost is not what holds them back actively or passively,” Luckey wrote.

Oculus’ founder thinks that in the next two years, the „hypothetical ultimate ceiling” for virtual reality will be fifty million active users, „and that could only happen with an unreasonable amount of investment that would be better spent on other parts of the problem” according to his post. He remains a „true believer” in virtual reality, though.

We have to admit that while Palmer Luckey has harsh thoughts, he has a point…

Source: GamesIndustry