While companies like Sony and Meta have made significant advancements in the field of virtual reality gaming, despite their combined success, VR is still mostly a specialized business with little potential for broad adoption of either software or hardware. And as you can anticipate, this has discouraged some potential competitors from entering the market.
The Xbox is one among them. Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty discussed VR in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He said that for Microsoft, which requires player bases of 10 million players (or close to that number) for a game to be considered a proper success, VR simply doesn’t have a large enough audience yet to justify investing in the market.
For us, Booty said, “I think there’s just a little bit of waiting until there’s an audience there.” “It’s a blessing for us that these significant intellectual properties have developed into long-running brands with sizable communities. Although the fact that 10 games have amassed over 10 million players overall is a significant achievement, it’s just that AR and VR technology isn’t quite there yet for that type of scale that we need to see game success.
The topic of virtual reality has obviously been raised with Microsoft before, and the company has already made it clear that it does not view that market as one it wants to focus on, for a number of reasons.
The market’s other participants are still making efforts to grow. For instance, the PS VR2 launched earlier this year, albeit it appears to have had a less-than-stellar launch in terms of sales. Meta Quest 3 is scheduled to come later this year.