Is Virtual Reality The Next 'Savior of Coin-op?'
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- Опубликовано: 8 ноя 2022
- arcadeheroes.com - I've promised to do this for a while now, despite VR stuff not really catching a lot of attention on the blog. There's a ton of in-industry hype about it though, so let's talk VR and why I'm skeptical about it.
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I view VR as none other than a huge gimmick more than anything.
The Vader Immortal cabinet sounded like the perfect embodiment of well done VR in an arcade format, I saw it for $15,000 and I wonder if they were happy about its lifecycle.
I guess if VRSENAL is still alive today it should have done well. They claim on their website that their newest single game cabinet "Monolith" would be below 25K.
But yes once again a $15/25K cabinet for a single game that does not attract that many customers is hard to justify, it was the perfect candidate for a generic multigame VR cab.
If you do see any of those VR cab manufacturers it would be cool to see their thoughts on multigame cabs since they are already "porting" commercial VR games on it.
Other than that, I agree with you that VR is still not attractive enough and therefore not profitable considering the price and the quick obsolescence of that emerging tech.
Same for AR which feels to me too cumbersome to see through an helmet and is more tailored for holographic projection mapping hardware instead.
Wouldn't the revenue sharing thing make more sense if it was made like SEGA ALLS where the operator owns the cabinet and mabe the platform/computer but then does not have to buy any new game that comes out through several services like Epic/Steam/GoG ? VR might be the only thing that not that many people do own and would still like to play. After all, VR centers exists but thanks to those compact cabs like VRSENAL it would take a single arcade cabinet "slot"
But yes, as of today in the early 20s those helmets are too cumbersome to be attractive and single game cabinets are too expensive for what they would probably yield for the operator.
I think it's all about AR. I'm prototyping rn.
Another problem with VR is that it's a very solitary experience that can't be shared with others. Even with an extra display, your friends cannot really see what it's like for you to play the game, and more importantly, you and your company don't see each others faces, thereby making it hard to share the fun.
I think VR can be a cool thing in the arcade space. I can only handle VR in short bursts and it doesn't really keep my attention. I think development will continue with this but I'm personally not that excited about it.
Had playstation VR, created feeling of motion sickness 100%. Otherwise really cool. Had to return. I thought pinballs we're expensive. 40k+ is nuts. I came down there on what must have been pinball league night... 2-3 people at every pin.
IMO the viability of arcade/LBE VR will greatly depend upon the extent to which meta have success in the consumer space, and the question of whether they will continue to try and downplay LBE in the future - they've been notably adamant that it won't be a part of their business plans (despite twisting the concept to their preferences in experiments), and as mentioned have of course gone to the extremes of forbidding operators from running beat saber in arcades...
There's long been a weird love/hate (mostly hate) relationship that FB/Meta's had with commercial use. There's one out there called Hero Zone which will be at IAAPA which uses a Quest.
One thing I noticed but didn't mention in the video is how I've noticed some companies backing off from VR. Bandai Namco is a big one, mainly for not really promoting Mario Kart VR like they could have; We Play VR wasn't their own thing so I think that's where they kind of shrugged about it. A few years back (2017ish) UNIS launched a whole new division to make VR stuff but after showing a bunch of games once, never saw them again (they will have one new VR game at IAAPA but it's a far cry from what they used to show off).
In discussing it with some industry guys, it's become a super-competitive space but I think for some companies it's better to to focus on what they do/know best than to go chasing after this different kind of beast.
@@arcadeheroes_coinop i assume the new UNIS game is sailor's quest? was under the impression up to now that it was launching slightly later on at EAG, good to know that we'll be seeing it in action sooner
and yeah, tracking these companies' off and on VR interests is beginning to get confusing - IIRC namco first experimented with virtuality on a pac-man game in the 1990s, just like sega and taito did, but as ever had backed out until their more recent endeavours
though i can't recall them doing anything during the initial 90s boom at all, i have also wondered whether konami will bring their consumer VR bemani title to arcades, as barely anyone cared about it on release and it would make for a fairly cost-effective new franchise if they did things right
@@ted90909 That reminds me of the other big VR thing they were doing - Project i-Can. Quite a bit of fanfare with that and some cool ideas but seems to have been killed post-2020.
I do imagine that Sega is seeing how VR Agent does to figure out if it's worth pursuing...RT is all-in (I think they even tested Jurassic Park VR but I don't know how it's done)
@@arcadeheroes_coinop SAI may well have renewed faith in VR, but could be interesting to see what japan may do as well - i was looking at the announced booth sizes for JAEPO 2023 the other day, and despite the talk of them not bringing much along at all, sega are occupying nearly as much space as they did in 2020. i recall a bunch of VR stuff from other companies was on show at their booth last time, so i am keeping an eye out for any surprises in store for 2023
Cant stand VR, its cool but holy crap i get motion sickness bad, ruins the rest of the day. I’ll take regular arcade type games all day long