Da teknologien oprindeligt blev introduceret, var der enorme håb og store forventninger til virtual reality. Nogle betragtede teknologien som det næste kvantespring for gaming og interaktivitet. VR lettede dog aldrig rigtigt og var i årevis hæmmet af dyre modeller og tekniske opsætninger, der gjorde det utilgængeligt for de fleste fans. Meta Quest forsøgte at afhjælpe mange af disse problemer ved at tilbyde en mere overkommelig og trådløs oplevelse, men der var stadig et andet problem: Softwareudviklere formåede kun sjældent at lave spil, der var værd at investere i på den stadig noget nicheprægede VR-platform.Men kan tingene snart ændre sig?
Under vores tid hos DevGAMM talte vi med den erfarne direktør Jeff Hilbert, og her faldt snakken på VR-området, og hvorfor han nu har valgt at investere og udforske dette marked yderligere.
"No, I never bought into VR and AR 10 years ago. I started buying in two years ago, and I'm buying in more and more, even now as we're hearing everything from Meta, because I'm simply watching the numbers," indleder Hilbert.
Hvad angår årsagen til, at han så at sige har ændret holdning, fortæller Hilbert os følgende:
"Well, Google doesn't share, Meta doesn't share, but you can kind of pick up ancillary numbers by watching the market and watching that, 'oh, they're doing a sequel'. You're looking at it like, 'oh, they just did an update'. That's an expensive update. Then you can kind of look at the content they're doing, part of this is being in the game industry, they must be generating a lot more revenue than we think. "So the market segmenting, everybody was trying to do VR, and there just weren't a lot of good VR games. They just weren't good, they weren't interesting, they weren't good. The cameras are getting better, people are learning how to... people are getting more comfortable wearing them. So there's just a whole thing that's happening. There's a zeitgeist happening with VR right now where people are getting more comfortable wearing them. The headsets are getting lighter, the fidelity is going up, and people are really learning how to make the games for it, for a better experience. And that's it.
"It's very interesting because people were talking with me about, 'I don't think VR is going to make it. I'm not ready for VR. We're not ready for it'. And then all of a sudden, when everyone is saying the industry is going down, I'm like, I'm in."
Afslutningsvis kom Hilbert ind på, hvorfor vi bør holde øje med, hvad Meta gør, og hvordan virksomheden driver sin VR- og metaverse-afdeling.
"Money is coming from somewhere because VCs are not investing in this anymore, so they have to be doing it out of cash flow, and to do that update out of cash flow, it's selling. So that's my metric that I'm focusing on right now."
Se hele interviewet med Hilbert herunder, hvor vi også kommer ind på filmatiseringer, hvordan milliard-franchises bliver bygget på budgetter på 20 millioner dollars, og hvordan forbrugere ikke spiller fonde, men spil.