Be Excellent To Each Other

It's only free with pre-orders isn't it? I'm not sure on the likely figures there but it's not going to be anywhere near the full sales figures for the handset. I'm still not convinced how well that platform's going to do in the long run given the requirements of only running on certain handsets by a single company. The PlayStation VR definitely has far and away the best chance of being successful given the various factors involved.

But it's more like a monitor/TV replacement though isn't it?

You might spend considerably more than £250 on a TV

A peripheral should be whatever the 'value' of the functionality it adds; trying to come up with some rule based on the cost of the console itself is nonsense.

I wouldn't have thought so from a commercial pricing point of view. At £250 you're effectively doubling the cost of the console. I'd find it tricky to believe that a significant number would pay again for a headset.

You're right. It should cost £100 but only have the motion sensors and body tracking but no headset oh shit that's Kinect

Which was excellent.

I doubt they're expecting half the people who have a PS4 to get one or anything. Lots of people buy racing wheels or £300 graphics cards for their PCs, there's loads of people into games with enough disposable income that £250 is not really much money.

The technology was pretty good, I agree. What was the killer app though? Software support was pretty much shovelware and it was soon dropped from the Xbox One entirely.

Oh I don't disagree for a moment that there is the hobbyist market there. But, if it were to be become properly mainstream, selling g it for the same price as the console isn't the way to get it there.

To summarise: For mainstream users, I think price point possibly too high given current cost of console.

Going from the price of the others I'd imagine that they're selling them for not a lot more than they cost to make. I don't think £250 is a barrier to something become fairly mainstream, it just depends how much people end up wanting it.

Kinect Sports 1 and 2 were excellent fun. I was sad to see it die, although I knew it would - maybe not so much because of software support but because of the size of room you need to use it.

Ah, is it? OK, fair enough.

Consider that Samsung sold about 45 million S6s in 2015, but lifetime sales of the PS4 are 36 million ish. GalaxyVR could come to dominate the other platforms in install count, by sheer force of numbers of the host platform.

Also: don't underestimate how cool it is for your VR headset not to be tethered to anything. Lands End, the VR game from ustwo (who made Monument Valley), wouldn't work on a Rift; you have to turn back and forth too far.

And in a twist no one saw coming, site dies on its arse.

Yes. There's probably 5 price point boxes to consider which are £50 increments. Games sit in the lowest 0-50 quid and the console sits in the highest 200-250. Controllers and stuff seem to sit in 50 to 100. I'd say higher end peripherals would probably do best in the 100 to 199 range. You could probably then divide it into two boxes, 100 to 150 and 150 to 200. As demand increase as cost falls, you would keep that in mind when thinking about where a VR doidah would sit. You probably would not want it in the top box of 200 to 250 as that makes your console not king of the hill. You need to keep that brand value there. So you drop down a level into high end peripherals and sell it at 199. This allows you to drop to 179 every now and again to drive sales. So, that's why I think 250 isn't great. It'll sell but it is better positioned lower down.

Is Samsung GearVR just a nice cardboard, or does it do other stuff?

I decided to take a punt, so we'll at least know whether it was the wrong choice.


Pc is at least up to the task.

If I'd had the same results as you I'd be going for the Vive as well.

I think so; your post above was actually the first time I'd heard of this at all but from Googling it I could only turn up chat about a pre-order giveaway.



Hmmmm, yeah, but the difference there is the potential interest level of the userbase. Every single person with a high spec PC or PS4 is someone who's interested in gaming and, by extension, VR stuff by definition. A good chunk of S7 owners won't give the slightest shit about VR past an initial fiddle with it; they just wanted a new phone but Samsung chucked a plastic helmet at them as well. I've no idea what difference that will make of course, but I genuinely don't think you can do a straight comparison here.

The downside of course is that it's pretty uncool when your VR headset packs in because the battery's run out. And now your mobile phone needs charging as well.

No, that's OK, because you probably need an anti-nausea break anyway

I've toyed with the idea of pre-ordering an S7 just to get the "free" GearVR, and then selling the S7 after - as Jem already has an S6 edge which would work with it.

15,000 Vives sold in 10 mins. http://www.kitguru.net/components/vr/jo ... 0-minutes/

All that says to me is that they had a high-availability website.

Is that a lot? I have no idea.

Wouldn't you lose more money on the phone than the headset is worth? They only cost £80 to buy outright and I'd expect you'd lose more than that selling the phone on as second hand.

Yeah, that's more or less what's stopped me, although I wouldn't sell the phone as second hand, it'd be !!!L@@K BRAND NEW IN BOX AND SHR!NK WRAPPING L@@K!!!

You'll probably be better off waiting until the preorders ship and then buying one of the hundreds of unwanted headsets that'll end up on ebay.

You were going to sell it on eBay? Well you're definitely better off just buying a headset for £80 outright then. Hell, aren't you better off doing none of this and just spending an afternoon hammering nails into your dick rather than dealing with eBay?

Is Hammering Nails Into Your Dick Simulator 2016 a Rift exclusive, or will it be available on Vive too?

JackSepticEye got his hands on a Vive and video'd himself trying out it out. I've got a lot of time for him in general but even if you dislike him I think this is a useful video because (a) he's used the Rift quite heavily in the past so has a good basis for comparison and (b) he's not massively technical so is just giving a (presumably) honest impression from a pure experience point of view.

Spoiler alert: he thinks it's awesome and a lot better than the rift.

Can't look at the video as I'm at work, but is he comparing that to the release version of the Rift, or the DK2?

That was a pretty good demonstration. His persona is quite annoying, but the enthusiasm helps sell the product.

Bah, I wish I was rich.

Presumably the DK2 as the release version's not available yet is it? His comments are largely about how the ability to move around the room navigating a 'real' space is what makes it so immersive so I don't know if it would matter which version of the Rift was the comparison.

I suspect he's a bit of an acquired taste. Having ended up watching quite a lot of his stuff, for reasons I can't even remember, I now find him genuinely funny and engaging. He seems to be completely guileless which is weirdly refreshing.

Yeah, I get that from him too. Like a 10 year old showing off his toys and really wanting you like them.

Until this youtuber lets us know which is best, any speculation is pointless.

I'm not surprised. I've had a sneaking suspicion for a while that it'll be the better product.

£750 with delivery though. Fuck that.

In all likelihood, one of these things is Betamax, and the other is either VHS or Laserdisc. You need pretty big balls or deep pockets to order either right now.

I'm not sure. They can both coexist I think. Games don't need to do anything in particular to support one over the other, do they?

Technically they possibly can, though I suspect there will be some non-trivial effort required to make something work in both 'formats' because there is a subtly different concept being modelled with each hardware set. In terms of the Doc's comparison there was probably less work required on the production side to output in either VHS or Betamax and yet still only one survived so arguably there's even more likelihood of a whittling here. In both cases consumers are very unlikely to want to own both sets of hardware so I think the market will end up choosing one or the other.

The real question is: who/what represents the porn industry in this comparison?

They'll all be laserdiscs when the better versions come out in two or three years won't they?

At the risk of sounding like an Oculus fanboy, I don't see how the Vive can stack up when the SteamVR SDK doesn't support the asynchronous timewarp feature that Oculus SDK does, which is going to be crucial IMO until we get PCs that are capable of running VR games at higher than the minimum frame rate constantly.

You do sound like an Oculus fanboy, but that's ok because you've just shelled out £500 on one.

Those who have used both seem to think the Vive is better, so

Valve can patch that in software. Oculus can't release a patch for the Rift to bring it up to the Vive's featureset.

Not until it's shipped, I haven't!

Not the PS4 VR thing.

Well, no, that would be a VHS or Betamax in this analogy.

One presumably less viable for playing nuddy videos.

Well, yeah, but (a) my question was about who/what, if anything, represented the deciding factor about which technology gets adopted which you've muddled there and (b) I don't literally mean which of the devices will be the best for watching porn so it doesn't matter whether the PS4 headset can be used for porn or not.

It would be a real danger wank with a VR headset and headphones on, unless you were in a locked room or something.

I know. But I do have a suspicion that the porn industry might actually drive a not insignificant amount of sales. Although at the low end of the market.