Despite the optimism expressed on the face of our own Sebastian Anthony here, Valve's Gabe Newell has pretty measured outlook for the technology.
With Valve investing so much time, effort, and money into its SteamVR initiative (and the nearly year-old HTC Vive headset), you might think the company would be pretty bullish about the technology's potential to revolutionize home computing. But in a rare round table interview (as reported by Polygon), Valve CEO and cofounder Gabe Newell was surprisingly frank about the company's measured expectations for the entire field.
"We're optimistic. We think VR is going great. It's going in a way that's consistent with our expectations," says Newell. That said, "we're also pretty comfortable with the idea that it will turn out to be a complete failure.
"Some people have got attention by going out and saying there'll be millions of [VR unit sales] and we're like, wow, I don't think so," Newell continued.
This is likely a reference to major VR competitor Oculus, whose then-CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars in 2014 it expected "north of a million sales" for its first consumer Rift headset, with "hopefully... many millions" for a second-generation follow-up.
Many industry watchers have suggested that the high entry price for top-end PC VR—roughly $800 plus a beefy computer to power it—is holding the field back from those high sales numbers. But Newell suggests we need better VR content before we rush to better VR prices.
"I can't point to a single piece of content that would cause millions of people to justify changing their home computing..." he said. "If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 percent cheaper, that's still not a huge market. There's still not a really incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR... There's an old joke that premature cost reduction is the root of all evil."
One reason for the measured VR expectations in the short-term is headset technology that Newell describes as "barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience."
Newell says some of the current tech problems are well on the way to being solved, though, with headsets that are smaller, lighter, and sporting better resolution already being worked on in development labs.
On resolution, especially, Newell expects that, by 2018 or 2019, VR headsets will provide "higher [resolution] than just about anything else, with much higher refresh rates than you're going to see on either desktops or phones. You'll see the VR industry leapfrogging any other display technology."
That's a bold prediction that somewhat echoes Oculus founder Palmer Luckey predicting that VR would eventually make flat panel displays obsolete—though Luckey gave that prediction 20 years to come true.
The best sign that VR has a long future, according to Newell, is the fact that developers that dip their toes into the space keep coming back with new ideas. "That feels like the kind of fruitful, frothy excitement that you want to see when you're aspiring to build something that’s going to be worth more and more."
Eventually, he thinks that those developers will create enough quality content that gets rational consumers to the "buy" point. It's a process Valve is helping along by developing three full-length, original VR titles of its own.
Polygon's full write-up of the interview is well worth a read for a closer look at the reserved Valve CEO, who's often reluctant to speak to the press but can be quite forthcoming when he does.