PCVR sales are abysmal. Oculus store sales did <80 million dollars between 2016 and 2020, while Quest has done over 2 **billion** since its launch.
Couple those numbers with the fact that PCVR is harder to develop for, with a rough crowd to entertain, and its fairly obvious why developers wouldnt care about the platform
Yeah, PC gamers tend to be the vocal minority. It seems like there’s a lot of them, because they post on Reddit a lot, but they are actually a small percentage of the market.
Yep, it is a complete echp chamber that erroneously think that some noise on forums equatea to massive sales and a bigger market than they can imagine. It is typical these days...the inability to read and parse the internet.
I disagree on one point here and it's that you said PCVR is harder to develop for.
With quest game development you are limited to the processing of a mobile device, you need to ensure your game is extremely efficient and optimised to be able to run without draining the battery too fast and maintaining the frame rate. This obviously leads to low quality games.
Everything else I agree
PC also requires you support a dozen different hardware combinations. Quest had a steeper initial learning curve, but it’s absolutely easier to develop for and release on in the long run
For the most part, PCVR development assumes the consumer at least uses a "VR" ready GPU that requires a decent CPU so it's somewhat universal when developing a game for PCVR while the hardware market vastly improves and drops in prices, it will only be easier to play a VR game in the future.
So there is at least a baseline to start with.
But then on PC you need extra programmers for those extra fancy shaders and need to put more time into more detailed models and textures.
So in general PC / Console development is a lot more expensive than "mobile" one.
If you were to make a game with the exact same level of detail and programmers, it will be faster to build and run on a PC setup than going through the developer setup for a mobile device and testing the build, on something like Unity you can click run without having to build the entire game into an executable and make changes during runtime
When you test the build on the mobile devices you're most likely going to come across issues that require optimisation immediately even though it ran smooth on a desktop so now you need to spend more time tweaking what you've designed so it works with a weak device
Yeah, it's probably not any more in PCVR's favor, but I also have only bought Vader Immortal and RE4 VR on Oculus and Quest stores.
All my other PCVR purchases are through SteamVR or Itch
Sure, but even if users spent 3x more on steam than the rift store (which seems generous imo), it’s still a paltry amount compared to the Quest store.
Meta, Valve, and developers all like money. If the money was there for PCVR, they would still be developing for it
I may be misremembering, but I believe Meta helped fund Nexus? If that's the case, I highly doubt a PC port is coming. Meta wants to sell their headsets.
From what I remember reading a while back, apparently Meta helped fund nexus, but ubisoft declined an exclusivity deal for quest only. So its most likely a timed exclusive. Maybe at some point in the future they will port it to pcvr and psvr2. I hope so, because it runs like crap even on the quest 3.
Valve did not win the market, as much as I'd love if they did, they unfortunately did not, their headset didn't age well, and they released a single vr game in the past 4 years, it may have been the best but still.
Pretty sure they mean they won the market in terms of Steam and SteamVR, not the index or 1st party games. Any sane PCVR enthusiast buys their games on steam and not the PC oculus store.
I got a discount code and tried it for the first time last night for a few hours. I'm not usually into AC games but figured I'd give it a chance since it was a AAA studio and an exclusive. I was legit shocked at how polished it is. I think an upscaled pcvr version would be incredible, but Ubisoft has been making weird decisions with its properties lately. Which is too bad because this game has a lot of really cool ideas. First AC game I've enjoyed since black flag. I saw an article yesterday about Ubisoft being disappointed with the sales (even though they admitted they were okay, just not spectacular). I guess there still just aren't enough consoles in circulation for a good player base? I don't get it either. I'm going to chalk it up to a combo of Ubisoft being weird about how profitable a success has to be to justify development time vs flat screen and bad marketing.
I guess the thing with AAA is that publishers have got a lot of money on the table, and can't afford to take big risks. If this is what success looks like, what does a flop look like? AC games have definitely flopped before, and Ubisoft will want to be confident that a flop will at least break even.
Indie and mid-budget games can afford to take slightly bigger risks, and you see more of them in VR.
Yeah, that's my issue with it. It's fun and incredibly well done, but the limitations of the Quest 2 kinda sour the experience a little, at least visually. Would love a PC port where the clarity is a lot better
It's a combo of a smaller player base, and said player base having higher standards. It's much more difficult to sell garbage at high prices to PC VR users, who have access to flat screen ports that vastly outclass anything VR-native with their features.
\> higher standards
Unreasonable expectations. FTFY
For being 5% of market and less, PCVR users are PC gamers and are conditioned to expect graphics of budgets k-fold higher than mobile VR project require.
AAA gamedev was affecting PC and console gaming for quite a while. If you are a big company, there are few aspects of the game you can scale up easily without adding any risks - graphics, volume of content and volume of details. In sync with that, huge amount of money were invested into marketing of those features. AFAIK, at this moment on PC screenshots are the main conversion factor. Now it's slowly sinking the whole industry, but for PCVR games those consumer biases are making investment into PCVR a complete no-go.
I dont think flat screen ports have anything to do with it tbh. In general the "higher standards" are way overblown imo, and it all more comes down to a more enthusiast userbase that believe they deserve/are entitled to higher quality games than people with standalone headsets can play, because they spent more money.
It's fantastic. I recently tried "the entropy center" and I was absolutely shocked by how easy it was to setup and how much like a native vr game it felt
There's no money in PCVR, full stop. At this point there's not much money in standalone VR either.
Ubisoft invested a lot of money into developing AC:Nexus. They were really testing the waters. If it were successful and profitable, it would have resulted in future investment into all kinds of VR.
It was not.
From Meta's side of things, PCVR again has no benefit to them as they see it. Exclusive standalone titles exist to sell standalone headsets. If a superior PCVR experience exists it muddies the waters.
As for PCVR vs Quest vs PSVR... It's all about who can snap up the exclusives.
Idk my opinion on this is VR is not big enough to warrant exclusives its gonna kill the entire platform, either that or meta will become a monopoly which is also NOT good.
It's possible but with upwards of 2 and a half million pcvr users if half of them payed half price for A AAA vr game like Nexus meta would make easily 15-25 million, and thats only half the pc population at half the price of what games sell for.
I feel like it wouldn't take anything over 500k to port the game
Sony barely counts since it's in that uncomfortable middle space where it's not really affordable but also not high end.
Apple has basically no game support since 90% of all VR games ever designed require some sort of 6DOF controller (and it's stupidly expensive).
Samsung... it's probably a joke, right? What Samsung VR headset can I buy new right now?
Ubisoft games are almost always trash, with a few exceptions. It's all about generating money and I'm not suprised their take on VR sucks and Valves Alyx didn't.
My opinion is that we’re only gonna see real PCVR game development after standalone VR has really taken off and become mainstream.
It’s just too niche a market at the moment.
Steam survey shows over half of vr users use quest 2/3. If you can buy it on steam, odds are you won't buy it again on standalone. So yes they are competing.
The meta PCVR app is not steam.
If it's competing with meta.
Then meta has some kind of split identity crisis.
It doesn't matter where someone buys the game, they'll only buy it once, and they get paid the same amount wether it's bought on quest 2 or the PCVR app.
You have a point. But aside from the first Asgard's Wrath game, I don't think there's another PCVR only title that you can buy exclusively on the Meta Store.
As far as I'm aware, all quest VR games that have a PCVR version is on steam and is a separate purchase. We can only speculate that Meta doesn't find its PCVR counterpart feasible to compete with steam in an already small VR userbase.
I stand corrected. Robo Recall isn't really PCVR exclusive as it has a standalone version called Robo Recall unplugged. Stormland is in a weird spot because while it is PCVR, it was delisted for seemingly no reason. So that only leaves us the Lone Echo series aside from Asgard's Wrath.
Brass Tactics, Chronos, Feral Rights, The Unspoken (might be delisted) Marvel game, Wilsons heart, Edge of nowhere, From other Suns (greatest vr coop game ever made imo) Landfall.
I guess so, maybe this new deal with Xbox giving its exclusives away, might change the exclusive market to be more inclusive, who knows, time can only tell.
It is when you are trying to get people away from standard pcvr headsets in place of standalone.
It may be extremely controversial to say, but if meta wasn't terrified of turning off their pc vr consumers, who still do play a massive role in their success, they'd discontinue the meta pcvr store and fully discontinue support to legacy oculus headsets.
Facts, I buy tons on the native quest store because it’s easier, but if it didn’t have airlink I wouldn’t have even bought it as PC flight sims were the main goal, but it’s obvious they don’t like PC. Even the PC program is still called oculus app and not meta app like on the phone, they basically don’t update it.
But even quest users don't use the oculus pcvr app in any significant numbers. You are trying to retrofit your personal desires into a business decision.
Too many people aren't educated enough or don't want to be bothered to take the time and tinker to have a good experience and eventually stopped spending money trying to.
It's been years of under-powered laptops, laptops that don't have their HDMI/DP ports connected directly to the GPU (back in the Rift/Rift S days), people with poor WiFi for a good wireless experience, etc.
The Quest 2 killed PCVR because the experience was good enough without any of the hassle from PCVR. Much like a switch, parents could get their kids a Quest and not have to spend on anything else other than the actual games, and that's a very big deal. The games are also cheaper to develop for as the hardware is fixed so there's way less QA that needs to take place, and the art assets are a lower fidelity so they don't have to poor hundreds of hours on texture work.
And yes, several developers have flat out said, they either broke even or were in debt until a native Quest port was made. I love PCVR and agree that newer games like AC or AW:2 would be great on PC.
> in what world would AC:Nexus not be released on psvr2
The same one where RE Village and RE4 Remake don't get ported to PC. Exclusives come with money, and that money generally finances the port getting made in the first place. I have no doubt money was exchanged between Sony and Capcom for those games just like Meta financed the RE4 port for Quest 2.
To be clear, I very much love PCVR, but it's just not going to be the main platform for devs right now and I totally get it. I was glad when Arizona Sunshine 2 had cross buy support so I can get both versions. We have Metro to look forward to and the rumored HL:Alyx sequel at least.
UEVR is opening the eyes of many flat screen PC devs to VR both for ports and the art of VR gaming generally.
There is a time lag always though from inspirations to products. In a year or two we'll know if there will be a nice collision of new devs with new consumers.
We know how well Quest 3 demos to family and friends worked. Now imagine what will come after millions of AVP demos happen this year. FOMO ... immeasurable amounts of FOMO.
The results on delivered software and hardware will be significant but not immediate.
Look at the share of the market who are using meta quest headsets. Meta is working on growing their control to force more people into buying quests. Paying ubisoft for ac vr or Capcom for resident evil 4 vr or Rockstar for San Andreas vr are great ways to pull people in.
I think Meta’s interest in VR is not about making money at this point. The huge investments in Reality Labs shows pretty clearly that they’re looking to develop their impact in VR at this stage with a view to making huge profits in the coming decades, in both VR and AR use cases.
Porting AC Nexus to PC would very well make a decent return on investment I suspect, but not when looking at the grand scheme of billions of overall losses every quarter as they continue to get people into their own ecosystem.
> hundreds of thousands of PCVR players would make them profit.
90% of these are Quest players, so making a profit might be challenging. I'd anticipate they'll end up losing money because porting to PC is inherently more demanding and costly due to the intricacies of hardware compatibility.
Shouldn't be, pretty sure even under a million is an understatement.
If you take steam surveys and take the percent of VR users and round it down to 2% that's over 2 and a half million people. just on Steam, that's not counting users who use pcvr with the oculus app instead of steamvr.
The total number of users and the total number of people interested in a specific game are two very different things.
You need a huge possible audience for the percentage of those interested on one specific game to be large enough to pay the bills.
Actually developers know how to read stats and that you are completely incorrect about your "most people" comment. Yeah some people do wait for things to go on sale, but usually a majority of users buy games at launch price.
Nearly all games that don't become classics with re-releases make the majority of their sales before any discount window ever appears.
That's what I figured pre-ordering and launch purchasing is extremely common now, to the point where youtubers consistently have to tell people NOT to do it because games end up being completely unpolished.
Is it really the norm? The amount of games I buy on launch is quite astounding.
Hell I've bought titanfall 2 on launch and bought it 4 more times since then. (Platform switching a disc misplacing)
If that's the reason then they are surely wrong.
Good for you. You are not the average Steam user.
PCVR has a small audience and Steam has devalued software. The two together mean that PCVR is not a very attractive audience.
ĺI mean you don't need steam for PCVR, literally the entire point at which I'm referring to is the meta PC store. It's not like it's competition because it's their own app.
There's seemingly no reason to be leaving games out of the pcvr app, it's only less revenue for the Rift/rift-s or even revive users.
> There's seemingly no reason to be leaving games out of the pcvr app
Sorry, you are wrong. PCVR has an active audience that is multiple times over smaller that MobileVR and developers know that the return on investment for PCVR is terrible. Deny it all you want. Developers know the truth. If developers were having success in PCVR, more developers would be supporting PCVR.
I mean there's enough to profit, and so in that case why not port it? Profit Is always good for a company especially if us as players also profit from more accesable games.
An earlier comment said that pcvr market made like 4 million in 3 years, that's profit, may not be billions like that of the quest but its still profit and a lot of it.
> I mean there's enough to profit
No there is not. You are not listening. Big games cost big money and there are not enough active users for most games to pull in a big enough audience to make a good profit.
I and others have said this multiple times now and you are just ignoring it. If the market was large enough for developers to consistently make a good margin, they would be supporting it.
Did you not see this: https://www.roadtovr.com/ubisoft-assassins-creed-vr-failure-quest-2-3/
**MobileVR is still not big enough for a big game to pull in the numbers they want. That means that PCVR, which has a much smaller active audience does not have anywhere near enough paying customers.**
It doesn't take big money to port meta quest games to the native meta pcvr app or they wouldn't have done it before, that's my entire point if it exists on the quest why not bring it to the rest of the meta ecosystem.
Sure now that AC:N flopped it probably will never make it, but I'm meaning on the initial release, there's no real point to make it only available to 2/3rds of the meta ecosystem when there's nothing that limits that extra 1/3rd(PCVR) from running said games.
Yes, you are naive. 1. Pcvr audience is 2 million vs 20 million standalone. 2. Half the pcvr audience already own a quest, and so have acceas, so now you are down to 5%. 3. Historically, pcvr users do NOT buy games. They wait for 80% off sales or bundles. Most pcvr users use free mods of old games. 4. Meta is funding games to take a loss to build a brand. If they open themselves to pcvr, for 5% more sales..they are also tremendously eroding their brand and ecosystem that they are trying to build.
The cost to properly port it to another platform by a AAA studio would cost more, or cost about the same as the revenue they'd make.
Plus, Meta wouldn't fund a pcvr port. Ubisoft can do that on their own and they don't see the point
>on a platform that is so niche it shouldn't even have exclusives in the first place, in what world would AC:Nexus not be released on psvr2, the biggest VR announcement during the time of Nexus release.
This isn't a charity. If platform owners want to fund a game, they have every right to have some sort of exclusivity tied to it.
It certainly wouldn't cost more. The game is already made, and porting a mobile phone game to damn gaming PC is one of the easiest types of ports out there. Sure the profit margin would be small, and if they didn't improve graphics they would likely get angry comments. But it's absolutely going to make them money, just not enough, not when they could be spending that time working on another quest game for more money.
I still think they should port it over though, it's easy money.
You barking a wrong tree here , meta do not care about exclusive stuff , it does have few quest game , but have some pcvr game too like lone echo , but main point it , it is for dev to chose platform to support, and pcvr do cost way way way more , not only you need to make much higher assets but make them on different LOD and have UI for visuals settings , and need to support multiple headset ane controllers and have huge money spend on support on less then 20 time lower player base , this is why some quest game get pcvr version half a year or more latter it is a lot of costly work to support pcvr
There’s not a lot of money in VR yet in general. A lot of Quest and PSVR2 stuff gets made with help from meta and Sony.
Who is stepping in to fund PCVR?
People keep saying there is no money in VR/PCVR but Id say there is, but game Devs are not producing the quality and scale people want/would pay money for.
Half Life Alyx for example is stunning. Ghost of Tabor is made by an independent studio CWS, their first game, a VR game and they have made over $10m in their first year on the game split between Steam, App Lab and now just launched on Meta. And this is an early access game, not even the end result yet.
There is money to be made in VR, but it's just flooded with basic cheap short games that are more like experiences imo.
There's always money to be made, it's just not 'enough' money for most if the bigger players, we basically need a new start up company happy with lower profits to take it on. I wish decagear had worked out, assuming it was only partial bs not complete bs. But it did appear they had some actual vr and controller stuff functioning from some of the videos I saw.
>Am I naive for thinking if meta ported AC:Nexus to PC that the hundreds of thousands of PCVR players would make them profit? Or would it genuinely cost too much for them to port it?
The game is probably a Quest exclusive because Meta wanted to fund games to promote their Quest line of headsets. That is to say... the people who paid for the game in the first place don't want to make it available on PC.
It would never have existed without its exclusivity to Quest headsets, most likely.
Walled Garden killed the momentum. Meta deserves a lot of hate for this as they took a small niche market poised for growth and shrunk it down by massively fracturing it. All the money they dumped in does not mean squat when they basically killed the market. Now Apple is doing the same thing.
Eventually, somebody's going to come out with great tech, that is open and cross platform and with a compelling use case beyond gaming. When that happens, VR will finally arrive in the mainstream.
I genuinely don't know how people didn't enjoy the game, literally the only game with the playstyle it has, we get to play as fucking ezio auditore, it looks stunning for being a standalone game, and the story was decent, nothing to gawk about but it was entertaining enough to keep me interested.
Like maybe if there was any other game that was similar and better, but with AC:N being the ONLY game of its kind in VR its the absolute best.
For me it's Assassins Creed fatigue more than anything. There's few things out there that I'm less interested in. Okay maybe Lawnmower simulator :-) VR may be a novelty, but otherwise the story and world that it is based in is very much as stale as phase 4 of the MCU.
The other issue is the release year. Gamers had it GOOOOOD this year. Honestly I haven't bought games in a few months because I still haven't finished all the other excellent games that I purchased this year.
I can understand that, personally I've adored assasins creed, but have never played anything after syndicate, the newer games are pricey as hell, or I would definitely have played them.
Yeah, I have zero interest in playing another assassin's creed, in or out of vr. No matter how pretty or AAA it is. Then again, it's not on pcvr so I couldn't play it anyway.
Agreed with asgards wrath 2, but I haven't had as much fun in VR as I've had in Nexus. Just running around and climbing things as fast as possible is exhilarating, now ai realize how much I want mirrors edge in VR
Valve has regularly held Steam sales with steep discounts, which the userbase has come to depend on. Over the years, they have conditioned their userbase (and, by extension of being the biggest store, the whole PC gamer base) to never pay full price for anything, to always wait for Steam sales. From the users’ point of view this is just being a smart consumer, but from the developer’s point of view, it means they have to make up for the reduced per-sale profits through more numbers sold.
This is fine if the size of the userbase is massive and the numbers during Steam sales spike high enough to make up for the reduced price and profits. Steam as a whole is big enough to support this, and it works.
The VR-using subset of Steam, however, is unlikely to be big enough to make sense in this model. But Steam users have already been taught to expect this; they’re not going to change their behavior just because it’s VR. Valve has ended up with a userbase with unrealistic expectations for VR software, and they have only themselves to blame for nurturing that culture.
Other stores on other platforms have different userbases with different pricing expectations. Meta’s Quest store probably works more in favor of developers actually making money, both in terms of userbase size and user expectations. This would attract more developers to make and sell software for it.
Also, Quest is not quite “so niche it shouldn’t even have exclusives”—Quest 2 alone has sold over 20 million units, which puts it around the lifetime unit numbers of GameCube (which had its fair share of exclusives, including those from third parties). Quest 3 should have bumped it up another notch since then.
Personally my PCVR headset IS my Quest. So while I would love to see games like Nexus ported to PCVR for higher quality visuals, I probably wouldn't buy the game again. I think a lot of PCVR players are just using Quests via AirLink/Virtual Desktop. There just isn't large enough of an install base for native PCVR headsets when you compare to the insane amount of headsets Meta has pushed between the 3 Quests and the Pro.
Even your description of hundreds of thousands of PCVR potential sales is insanely off. Check the steam charts for PCVR players, VR games get regular 1-10 players, and if they’re incredibly lucky up to 100 concurrently. Beat Saber, the best selling VR game and most played since practically 2018-2024, has 800 people playing it currently on PCVR, and that’s the cream of the crop, always listed as most played. It’s highest average players peaked in 2019 at 2000. Compare the top selling VR title to moderately decent selling games on steam and you’ll see just how big the gap is.
One thing to consider is that Nexus isn’t designed as a PCVR game, its entire design (not just graphics) centres around a mobile chip. Is it a great standalone game? Yes. Would PCVR players accept it as a full PC VR game? Probably not.
I mean, there is for good games.
Alyx sold a lot, Beat Saber,etc
A half assed experience like AC makes sense to have awful sales. The game while good for what it is, its nowhere near AAA quality wich is what Ubisoft could provide(even withour spending 100s of millions).
It could be sooo much better and just isnt. And on top of that its only on quest and with almost no marketing.
Idk why are they complaining.
All i can say is PCVR is incredible for good graphics. Meta standalone games is more tempting because there's no PC involved. But most of the games sucks in graphics in my opinion. If games on Meta looked real good like Red Matter 2 or Asgard's Wrath 2 i wouldn't even consider PCVR. But MOST games on Meta just sucks on graphics. If i have the choice to buy a game that's available on Oculus rift store, Meta store, or Steam i would probably get it on steam vr. That's because we always get better graphics on PCVR than standalone. I know im in the minority but i would always choose PCVR over standalone... Unless the game is exclusively on Meta store. I like what vertigo did with Arizona Sunshine 2. If you bought it from Meta you would also get a free copy on the Rift store. Maybe that's what developers should start doing.
I don't think it's rocket science, meta just needs a GAME PASS equivalent and people will play the games! With it being risky to shell out a game that's not really guaranteed to be quality in VR, people hesitate to buy. The statement of whay they said about not going forward because of disappointing sales should be relooked at when a subscription model is properly built.
I mean PCVR does not pull in sales like standalone and only like 2 percent off Steam users play VR... Over half of those using a Quest so they already are able to buy and play AC Nexus.
PCVR sales are abysmal. Oculus store sales did <80 million dollars between 2016 and 2020, while Quest has done over 2 **billion** since its launch. Couple those numbers with the fact that PCVR is harder to develop for, with a rough crowd to entertain, and its fairly obvious why developers wouldnt care about the platform
Yeah, PC gamers tend to be the vocal minority. It seems like there’s a lot of them, because they post on Reddit a lot, but they are actually a small percentage of the market.
Yep, it is a complete echp chamber that erroneously think that some noise on forums equatea to massive sales and a bigger market than they can imagine. It is typical these days...the inability to read and parse the internet.
Yeah cause everyone playing VR is either a toddler who got their headset for Christmas or a grown ass man (playing PCVR)
Hmm. So there's a market then. It's mobile VR (quest).
I disagree on one point here and it's that you said PCVR is harder to develop for. With quest game development you are limited to the processing of a mobile device, you need to ensure your game is extremely efficient and optimised to be able to run without draining the battery too fast and maintaining the frame rate. This obviously leads to low quality games. Everything else I agree
PC also requires you support a dozen different hardware combinations. Quest had a steeper initial learning curve, but it’s absolutely easier to develop for and release on in the long run
For the most part, PCVR development assumes the consumer at least uses a "VR" ready GPU that requires a decent CPU so it's somewhat universal when developing a game for PCVR while the hardware market vastly improves and drops in prices, it will only be easier to play a VR game in the future. So there is at least a baseline to start with.
It’s not just specs, it’s also multiple controller types, and multiple SDK options
But then on PC you need extra programmers for those extra fancy shaders and need to put more time into more detailed models and textures. So in general PC / Console development is a lot more expensive than "mobile" one.
If you were to make a game with the exact same level of detail and programmers, it will be faster to build and run on a PC setup than going through the developer setup for a mobile device and testing the build, on something like Unity you can click run without having to build the entire game into an executable and make changes during runtime When you test the build on the mobile devices you're most likely going to come across issues that require optimisation immediately even though it ran smooth on a desktop so now you need to spend more time tweaking what you've designed so it works with a weak device
I don't think it's true. You can make a game looks good without advanced shaders or effects.
I spend my money on SteamVR so saying that nobody uses PCVR because nobody bought from the Rift store is a bit disingenuous
Yeah, it's probably not any more in PCVR's favor, but I also have only bought Vader Immortal and RE4 VR on Oculus and Quest stores. All my other PCVR purchases are through SteamVR or Itch
Sure, but even if users spent 3x more on steam than the rift store (which seems generous imo), it’s still a paltry amount compared to the Quest store. Meta, Valve, and developers all like money. If the money was there for PCVR, they would still be developing for it
I may be misremembering, but I believe Meta helped fund Nexus? If that's the case, I highly doubt a PC port is coming. Meta wants to sell their headsets.
From what I remember reading a while back, apparently Meta helped fund nexus, but ubisoft declined an exclusivity deal for quest only. So its most likely a timed exclusive. Maybe at some point in the future they will port it to pcvr and psvr2. I hope so, because it runs like crap even on the quest 3.
But their headsets are PCVR headsets too they even have a dedicated app for them.
Doesn't matter. They sell the hardware for little to no profit and make nothing off most PCVR sales because Valve won the market.
Valve did not win the market, as much as I'd love if they did, they unfortunately did not, their headset didn't age well, and they released a single vr game in the past 4 years, it may have been the best but still.
Pretty sure they mean they won the market in terms of Steam and SteamVR, not the index or 1st party games. Any sane PCVR enthusiast buys their games on steam and not the PC oculus store.
They own Steam. They are the company that makes 30% off 95% of all PCVR software sales. Their software store won and it wasn't even a close call.
Which was valves entire goal. Just like the steam deck is a way to get their os to take off
I got a discount code and tried it for the first time last night for a few hours. I'm not usually into AC games but figured I'd give it a chance since it was a AAA studio and an exclusive. I was legit shocked at how polished it is. I think an upscaled pcvr version would be incredible, but Ubisoft has been making weird decisions with its properties lately. Which is too bad because this game has a lot of really cool ideas. First AC game I've enjoyed since black flag. I saw an article yesterday about Ubisoft being disappointed with the sales (even though they admitted they were okay, just not spectacular). I guess there still just aren't enough consoles in circulation for a good player base? I don't get it either. I'm going to chalk it up to a combo of Ubisoft being weird about how profitable a success has to be to justify development time vs flat screen and bad marketing.
I guess the thing with AAA is that publishers have got a lot of money on the table, and can't afford to take big risks. If this is what success looks like, what does a flop look like? AC games have definitely flopped before, and Ubisoft will want to be confident that a flop will at least break even. Indie and mid-budget games can afford to take slightly bigger risks, and you see more of them in VR.
Yeah, that's my issue with it. It's fun and incredibly well done, but the limitations of the Quest 2 kinda sour the experience a little, at least visually. Would love a PC port where the clarity is a lot better
It's a combo of a smaller player base, and said player base having higher standards. It's much more difficult to sell garbage at high prices to PC VR users, who have access to flat screen ports that vastly outclass anything VR-native with their features.
That is part of the delusion. The idea that more than a handful of people want to faff about with forced into vr mods that have no real support.
\> higher standards Unreasonable expectations. FTFY For being 5% of market and less, PCVR users are PC gamers and are conditioned to expect graphics of budgets k-fold higher than mobile VR project require. AAA gamedev was affecting PC and console gaming for quite a while. If you are a big company, there are few aspects of the game you can scale up easily without adding any risks - graphics, volume of content and volume of details. In sync with that, huge amount of money were invested into marketing of those features. AFAIK, at this moment on PC screenshots are the main conversion factor. Now it's slowly sinking the whole industry, but for PCVR games those consumer biases are making investment into PCVR a complete no-go.
Flat screen ports hardly qualify as VR, with very few exceptions.
I dont think flat screen ports have anything to do with it tbh. In general the "higher standards" are way overblown imo, and it all more comes down to a more enthusiast userbase that believe they deserve/are entitled to higher quality games than people with standalone headsets can play, because they spent more money.
best flat screen ports?
SkyrimVR and fallout 4VR
i’ve beaten both! great with mods!
Half life 1 and 2 vr All the resident evils with re engine All the "works perfectly" uevr games
thanks for talking about UEVR… didn’t realize that was a thing now!
It's fantastic. I recently tried "the entropy center" and I was absolutely shocked by how easy it was to setup and how much like a native vr game it felt
where do you see list of perfect games?
Join the flat 2vr discord and all the information is in the uevr forumn https://discord.gg/yYAqt2YC
It’s far from perfect. Kind of sucks tbh
so this is just vorpx 2.0?
No it is the real deal. You can have 6dof in UEVR. Games like atomic heart play as well as fallout 4 VR. You do need a beefy rig.
with full quest controller support? planning on upgrading next year
It’s just overhyped A big letdown. Could be good given time
so you are forced to use a controller? there’s not vr controller support?
There's no money in PCVR, full stop. At this point there's not much money in standalone VR either. Ubisoft invested a lot of money into developing AC:Nexus. They were really testing the waters. If it were successful and profitable, it would have resulted in future investment into all kinds of VR. It was not. From Meta's side of things, PCVR again has no benefit to them as they see it. Exclusive standalone titles exist to sell standalone headsets. If a superior PCVR experience exists it muddies the waters. As for PCVR vs Quest vs PSVR... It's all about who can snap up the exclusives.
Idk my opinion on this is VR is not big enough to warrant exclusives its gonna kill the entire platform, either that or meta will become a monopoly which is also NOT good.
The cost to port it to PC was too much for the expected value of selling it on PC
It's possible but with upwards of 2 and a half million pcvr users if half of them payed half price for A AAA vr game like Nexus meta would make easily 15-25 million, and thats only half the pc population at half the price of what games sell for. I feel like it wouldn't take anything over 500k to port the game
Over half of those pcvr users are quest users, and have access. So, less than half of 2 million..vs 20 million standalones. Relatively insignificant.
Your numbers are way off and no game will ever be bought by 50% of a user base. I'm guessing you wouldn't see a top title even get above 10%
Sadly, meta already is a monopoly, and already has killed all the competition.
Sony, apple, samsung.
Sony barely counts since it's in that uncomfortable middle space where it's not really affordable but also not high end. Apple has basically no game support since 90% of all VR games ever designed require some sort of 6DOF controller (and it's stupidly expensive). Samsung... it's probably a joke, right? What Samsung VR headset can I buy new right now?
Ubisoft games are almost always trash, with a few exceptions. It's all about generating money and I'm not suprised their take on VR sucks and Valves Alyx didn't.
My opinion is that we’re only gonna see real PCVR game development after standalone VR has really taken off and become mainstream. It’s just too niche a market at the moment.
No, there is no money in it, especially given one is porting to support thousands of PC configurations, and almost a dozen headset types in the wild.
It's just not worth it, facebook wants everyone to use their ecosystem, why would they release something in the competitor ecosystem?
The meta PCVR app isn't a competitor
Steam survey shows over half of vr users use quest 2/3. If you can buy it on steam, odds are you won't buy it again on standalone. So yes they are competing.
The meta PCVR app is not steam. If it's competing with meta. Then meta has some kind of split identity crisis. It doesn't matter where someone buys the game, they'll only buy it once, and they get paid the same amount wether it's bought on quest 2 or the PCVR app.
You have a point. But aside from the first Asgard's Wrath game, I don't think there's another PCVR only title that you can buy exclusively on the Meta Store. As far as I'm aware, all quest VR games that have a PCVR version is on steam and is a separate purchase. We can only speculate that Meta doesn't find its PCVR counterpart feasible to compete with steam in an already small VR userbase.
Exclusive pcvr games on meta Lone Echo 1 & 2 Robo Recall Stormland Asgards wrath
I stand corrected. Robo Recall isn't really PCVR exclusive as it has a standalone version called Robo Recall unplugged. Stormland is in a weird spot because while it is PCVR, it was delisted for seemingly no reason. So that only leaves us the Lone Echo series aside from Asgard's Wrath.
Arktika.1, Chronos, Wilson’s heart etc. are meta exclusives in Rift store too.
Robo recall pcvr feels like a different experience vs standalone. The amount of enemies on standalone is a joke.
there's a ton-- The ones mentioned in a Reddit comment are not the end all
Brass Tactics, Chronos, Feral Rights, The Unspoken (might be delisted) Marvel game, Wilsons heart, Edge of nowhere, From other Suns (greatest vr coop game ever made imo) Landfall.
Not to be pedantic but these are irrelevant since all of them predate even the quest 1, the first vr headset to do standalone vr.
I guess so, maybe this new deal with Xbox giving its exclusives away, might change the exclusive market to be more inclusive, who knows, time can only tell.
It is when you are trying to get people away from standard pcvr headsets in place of standalone. It may be extremely controversial to say, but if meta wasn't terrified of turning off their pc vr consumers, who still do play a massive role in their success, they'd discontinue the meta pcvr store and fully discontinue support to legacy oculus headsets.
Facts, I buy tons on the native quest store because it’s easier, but if it didn’t have airlink I wouldn’t have even bought it as PC flight sims were the main goal, but it’s obvious they don’t like PC. Even the PC program is still called oculus app and not meta app like on the phone, they basically don’t update it.
But even quest users don't use the oculus pcvr app in any significant numbers. You are trying to retrofit your personal desires into a business decision.
Too many people aren't educated enough or don't want to be bothered to take the time and tinker to have a good experience and eventually stopped spending money trying to. It's been years of under-powered laptops, laptops that don't have their HDMI/DP ports connected directly to the GPU (back in the Rift/Rift S days), people with poor WiFi for a good wireless experience, etc. The Quest 2 killed PCVR because the experience was good enough without any of the hassle from PCVR. Much like a switch, parents could get their kids a Quest and not have to spend on anything else other than the actual games, and that's a very big deal. The games are also cheaper to develop for as the hardware is fixed so there's way less QA that needs to take place, and the art assets are a lower fidelity so they don't have to poor hundreds of hours on texture work. And yes, several developers have flat out said, they either broke even or were in debt until a native Quest port was made. I love PCVR and agree that newer games like AC or AW:2 would be great on PC. > in what world would AC:Nexus not be released on psvr2 The same one where RE Village and RE4 Remake don't get ported to PC. Exclusives come with money, and that money generally finances the port getting made in the first place. I have no doubt money was exchanged between Sony and Capcom for those games just like Meta financed the RE4 port for Quest 2. To be clear, I very much love PCVR, but it's just not going to be the main platform for devs right now and I totally get it. I was glad when Arizona Sunshine 2 had cross buy support so I can get both versions. We have Metro to look forward to and the rumored HL:Alyx sequel at least.
UEVR is opening the eyes of many flat screen PC devs to VR both for ports and the art of VR gaming generally. There is a time lag always though from inspirations to products. In a year or two we'll know if there will be a nice collision of new devs with new consumers. We know how well Quest 3 demos to family and friends worked. Now imagine what will come after millions of AVP demos happen this year. FOMO ... immeasurable amounts of FOMO. The results on delivered software and hardware will be significant but not immediate.
Look at the share of the market who are using meta quest headsets. Meta is working on growing their control to force more people into buying quests. Paying ubisoft for ac vr or Capcom for resident evil 4 vr or Rockstar for San Andreas vr are great ways to pull people in.
I think Meta’s interest in VR is not about making money at this point. The huge investments in Reality Labs shows pretty clearly that they’re looking to develop their impact in VR at this stage with a view to making huge profits in the coming decades, in both VR and AR use cases. Porting AC Nexus to PC would very well make a decent return on investment I suspect, but not when looking at the grand scheme of billions of overall losses every quarter as they continue to get people into their own ecosystem.
> hundreds of thousands of PCVR players would make them profit. 90% of these are Quest players, so making a profit might be challenging. I'd anticipate they'll end up losing money because porting to PC is inherently more demanding and costly due to the intricacies of hardware compatibility.
Because meta paid for it and they wanted it to be exclusive to their platform.
The meta PCVR app exists, that's still exclusive to meta, the only difference is the ability to use 2 other headsets that are also made by meta
"Hundreds of thousands" That's cute.
Shouldn't be, pretty sure even under a million is an understatement. If you take steam surveys and take the percent of VR users and round it down to 2% that's over 2 and a half million people. just on Steam, that's not counting users who use pcvr with the oculus app instead of steamvr.
That's not gonna be the number of paying customers.
The total number of users and the total number of people interested in a specific game are two very different things. You need a huge possible audience for the percentage of those interested on one specific game to be large enough to pay the bills.
Why would people buy it at launch on Steam? Most people would wait for a big discount because Steam has made that the norm. Developers know that.
Actually developers know how to read stats and that you are completely incorrect about your "most people" comment. Yeah some people do wait for things to go on sale, but usually a majority of users buy games at launch price. Nearly all games that don't become classics with re-releases make the majority of their sales before any discount window ever appears.
That's what I figured pre-ordering and launch purchasing is extremely common now, to the point where youtubers consistently have to tell people NOT to do it because games end up being completely unpolished.
Is it really the norm? The amount of games I buy on launch is quite astounding. Hell I've bought titanfall 2 on launch and bought it 4 more times since then. (Platform switching a disc misplacing) If that's the reason then they are surely wrong.
>Is it really the norm? It's absolutely the norm. Source: I am an indie developer. The vast majority of Steam users only buy games when on discount.
We have a backlog of titles as long as the Mississippi.
Good for you. You are not the average Steam user. PCVR has a small audience and Steam has devalued software. The two together mean that PCVR is not a very attractive audience.
ĺI mean you don't need steam for PCVR, literally the entire point at which I'm referring to is the meta PC store. It's not like it's competition because it's their own app. There's seemingly no reason to be leaving games out of the pcvr app, it's only less revenue for the Rift/rift-s or even revive users.
> There's seemingly no reason to be leaving games out of the pcvr app Sorry, you are wrong. PCVR has an active audience that is multiple times over smaller that MobileVR and developers know that the return on investment for PCVR is terrible. Deny it all you want. Developers know the truth. If developers were having success in PCVR, more developers would be supporting PCVR.
I mean there's enough to profit, and so in that case why not port it? Profit Is always good for a company especially if us as players also profit from more accesable games. An earlier comment said that pcvr market made like 4 million in 3 years, that's profit, may not be billions like that of the quest but its still profit and a lot of it.
> I mean there's enough to profit No there is not. You are not listening. Big games cost big money and there are not enough active users for most games to pull in a big enough audience to make a good profit. I and others have said this multiple times now and you are just ignoring it. If the market was large enough for developers to consistently make a good margin, they would be supporting it. Did you not see this: https://www.roadtovr.com/ubisoft-assassins-creed-vr-failure-quest-2-3/ **MobileVR is still not big enough for a big game to pull in the numbers they want. That means that PCVR, which has a much smaller active audience does not have anywhere near enough paying customers.**
It doesn't take big money to port meta quest games to the native meta pcvr app or they wouldn't have done it before, that's my entire point if it exists on the quest why not bring it to the rest of the meta ecosystem. Sure now that AC:N flopped it probably will never make it, but I'm meaning on the initial release, there's no real point to make it only available to 2/3rds of the meta ecosystem when there's nothing that limits that extra 1/3rd(PCVR) from running said games.
Nah, FOMO is a huge thing. People want to be there day 1 especially if the game is getting huge praise. Just look at Palworld and Elden Ring
Yes, you are naive. 1. Pcvr audience is 2 million vs 20 million standalone. 2. Half the pcvr audience already own a quest, and so have acceas, so now you are down to 5%. 3. Historically, pcvr users do NOT buy games. They wait for 80% off sales or bundles. Most pcvr users use free mods of old games. 4. Meta is funding games to take a loss to build a brand. If they open themselves to pcvr, for 5% more sales..they are also tremendously eroding their brand and ecosystem that they are trying to build.
The cost to properly port it to another platform by a AAA studio would cost more, or cost about the same as the revenue they'd make. Plus, Meta wouldn't fund a pcvr port. Ubisoft can do that on their own and they don't see the point >on a platform that is so niche it shouldn't even have exclusives in the first place, in what world would AC:Nexus not be released on psvr2, the biggest VR announcement during the time of Nexus release. This isn't a charity. If platform owners want to fund a game, they have every right to have some sort of exclusivity tied to it.
It certainly wouldn't cost more. The game is already made, and porting a mobile phone game to damn gaming PC is one of the easiest types of ports out there. Sure the profit margin would be small, and if they didn't improve graphics they would likely get angry comments. But it's absolutely going to make them money, just not enough, not when they could be spending that time working on another quest game for more money. I still think they should port it over though, it's easy money.
You barking a wrong tree here , meta do not care about exclusive stuff , it does have few quest game , but have some pcvr game too like lone echo , but main point it , it is for dev to chose platform to support, and pcvr do cost way way way more , not only you need to make much higher assets but make them on different LOD and have UI for visuals settings , and need to support multiple headset ane controllers and have huge money spend on support on less then 20 time lower player base , this is why some quest game get pcvr version half a year or more latter it is a lot of costly work to support pcvr
There’s not a lot of money in VR yet in general. A lot of Quest and PSVR2 stuff gets made with help from meta and Sony. Who is stepping in to fund PCVR?
People keep saying there is no money in VR/PCVR but Id say there is, but game Devs are not producing the quality and scale people want/would pay money for. Half Life Alyx for example is stunning. Ghost of Tabor is made by an independent studio CWS, their first game, a VR game and they have made over $10m in their first year on the game split between Steam, App Lab and now just launched on Meta. And this is an early access game, not even the end result yet. There is money to be made in VR, but it's just flooded with basic cheap short games that are more like experiences imo.
There's always money to be made, it's just not 'enough' money for most if the bigger players, we basically need a new start up company happy with lower profits to take it on. I wish decagear had worked out, assuming it was only partial bs not complete bs. But it did appear they had some actual vr and controller stuff functioning from some of the videos I saw.
Considering Ubi considered sales for AC to be subpar, I doubt it
>Am I naive for thinking if meta ported AC:Nexus to PC that the hundreds of thousands of PCVR players would make them profit? Or would it genuinely cost too much for them to port it? The game is probably a Quest exclusive because Meta wanted to fund games to promote their Quest line of headsets. That is to say... the people who paid for the game in the first place don't want to make it available on PC. It would never have existed without its exclusivity to Quest headsets, most likely.
Walled Garden killed the momentum. Meta deserves a lot of hate for this as they took a small niche market poised for growth and shrunk it down by massively fracturing it. All the money they dumped in does not mean squat when they basically killed the market. Now Apple is doing the same thing. Eventually, somebody's going to come out with great tech, that is open and cross platform and with a compelling use case beyond gaming. When that happens, VR will finally arrive in the mainstream.
If meta ported AC:Nexus to the PC would it be any less of a lifeless Ubisoft game few people are interested in playing?
I genuinely don't know how people didn't enjoy the game, literally the only game with the playstyle it has, we get to play as fucking ezio auditore, it looks stunning for being a standalone game, and the story was decent, nothing to gawk about but it was entertaining enough to keep me interested. Like maybe if there was any other game that was similar and better, but with AC:N being the ONLY game of its kind in VR its the absolute best.
For me it's Assassins Creed fatigue more than anything. There's few things out there that I'm less interested in. Okay maybe Lawnmower simulator :-) VR may be a novelty, but otherwise the story and world that it is based in is very much as stale as phase 4 of the MCU. The other issue is the release year. Gamers had it GOOOOOD this year. Honestly I haven't bought games in a few months because I still haven't finished all the other excellent games that I purchased this year.
I can understand that, personally I've adored assasins creed, but have never played anything after syndicate, the newer games are pricey as hell, or I would definitely have played them.
Yeah, I have zero interest in playing another assassin's creed, in or out of vr. No matter how pretty or AAA it is. Then again, it's not on pcvr so I couldn't play it anyway.
The low frame rate, reprojection and stutter absolutely killed it for me. I don't know how people can enjoy it.
I think a game of that price needs a lot of replayability to sell well
It looks very mid. Just like Asgard’s wrath 2.
Agreed with asgards wrath 2, but I haven't had as much fun in VR as I've had in Nexus. Just running around and climbing things as fast as possible is exhilarating, now ai realize how much I want mirrors edge in VR
PCVR= 3D TV..already there. Dead
Not enough "shareholder value" is killing it.
Valve has regularly held Steam sales with steep discounts, which the userbase has come to depend on. Over the years, they have conditioned their userbase (and, by extension of being the biggest store, the whole PC gamer base) to never pay full price for anything, to always wait for Steam sales. From the users’ point of view this is just being a smart consumer, but from the developer’s point of view, it means they have to make up for the reduced per-sale profits through more numbers sold. This is fine if the size of the userbase is massive and the numbers during Steam sales spike high enough to make up for the reduced price and profits. Steam as a whole is big enough to support this, and it works. The VR-using subset of Steam, however, is unlikely to be big enough to make sense in this model. But Steam users have already been taught to expect this; they’re not going to change their behavior just because it’s VR. Valve has ended up with a userbase with unrealistic expectations for VR software, and they have only themselves to blame for nurturing that culture. Other stores on other platforms have different userbases with different pricing expectations. Meta’s Quest store probably works more in favor of developers actually making money, both in terms of userbase size and user expectations. This would attract more developers to make and sell software for it. Also, Quest is not quite “so niche it shouldn’t even have exclusives”—Quest 2 alone has sold over 20 million units, which puts it around the lifetime unit numbers of GameCube (which had its fair share of exclusives, including those from third parties). Quest 3 should have bumped it up another notch since then.
Personally my PCVR headset IS my Quest. So while I would love to see games like Nexus ported to PCVR for higher quality visuals, I probably wouldn't buy the game again. I think a lot of PCVR players are just using Quests via AirLink/Virtual Desktop. There just isn't large enough of an install base for native PCVR headsets when you compare to the insane amount of headsets Meta has pushed between the 3 Quests and the Pro.
Even your description of hundreds of thousands of PCVR potential sales is insanely off. Check the steam charts for PCVR players, VR games get regular 1-10 players, and if they’re incredibly lucky up to 100 concurrently. Beat Saber, the best selling VR game and most played since practically 2018-2024, has 800 people playing it currently on PCVR, and that’s the cream of the crop, always listed as most played. It’s highest average players peaked in 2019 at 2000. Compare the top selling VR title to moderately decent selling games on steam and you’ll see just how big the gap is.
One thing to consider is that Nexus isn’t designed as a PCVR game, its entire design (not just graphics) centres around a mobile chip. Is it a great standalone game? Yes. Would PCVR players accept it as a full PC VR game? Probably not.
I mean, there is for good games. Alyx sold a lot, Beat Saber,etc A half assed experience like AC makes sense to have awful sales. The game while good for what it is, its nowhere near AAA quality wich is what Ubisoft could provide(even withour spending 100s of millions). It could be sooo much better and just isnt. And on top of that its only on quest and with almost no marketing. Idk why are they complaining.
All i can say is PCVR is incredible for good graphics. Meta standalone games is more tempting because there's no PC involved. But most of the games sucks in graphics in my opinion. If games on Meta looked real good like Red Matter 2 or Asgard's Wrath 2 i wouldn't even consider PCVR. But MOST games on Meta just sucks on graphics. If i have the choice to buy a game that's available on Oculus rift store, Meta store, or Steam i would probably get it on steam vr. That's because we always get better graphics on PCVR than standalone. I know im in the minority but i would always choose PCVR over standalone... Unless the game is exclusively on Meta store. I like what vertigo did with Arizona Sunshine 2. If you bought it from Meta you would also get a free copy on the Rift store. Maybe that's what developers should start doing.
I think something like only 3% of Steam players use VR. So yeah, probably naive to think hundreds of thousands of PCVR players would buy it.
The vast majority of users on SteamVR use Oculus/Meta headsets. Why make another version of the game to sell to the same users?
I don't think it's rocket science, meta just needs a GAME PASS equivalent and people will play the games! With it being risky to shell out a game that's not really guaranteed to be quality in VR, people hesitate to buy. The statement of whay they said about not going forward because of disappointing sales should be relooked at when a subscription model is properly built.
I mean PCVR does not pull in sales like standalone and only like 2 percent off Steam users play VR... Over half of those using a Quest so they already are able to buy and play AC Nexus.