My charitable answer would be it's hard to break the chicken and egg cycle. Not enough headsets -> game developers don't target the platform -> no demand to buy headsets without games.

I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess.

(I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)

That’s easy to answer: there have been no great new games since Beat Saber and that was 6 years ago. People go through a lot of trouble and expense to have fun, but there’s no fun to be had in VR for most.

Puzzling Places and Walkabout Minigolf would like to have a word with you.

They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.

Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.

That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.

I don't mean to say that there are no fun games, but they're just not good enough to drive $400 expenses. They're not Pong and they're not Mario. They're not even Fruit Ninja or Mafia Wars. And yeah, your counterpoints being 4 years old isn't helping the case either.

New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.

As I mentioned above, Blades and Sorcery is my anecdotal counterexample. I will throw money at any new games like it.

Wait for Into the Radius 2. The first was a masterpiece as well.

Mine is collecting dust because something in my subconscious remembers the (mild) nausea when I use it and diverts me to something else. I think of it as a hind brain reaction, like a memory of a food that once made me sick. Is anyone looking for a good deal on a lightly used Quest 3?

That sucks, I think I know your pain. I'm also extremely sensitive (weak "VR legs") even after 6 years of developing for various headsets. Sorry to go into unsolicited debug mode (feel free to ignore) but have you tried any mixed reality games? Personally I have no problems with games like Eleven table tennis in MR mode, which lets you place the table in your living room so you don't have to worry about crashing into furniture (as much) and more importantly > 50% of what you see is color passthrough camera footage so your brain doesn't have to fight (if that's your issue). Also did you play with the IPD settings on the headset? That can also cause nausea if they are set wrong.

I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.

I found I am not highly sensitive to the VR disconnect but still found that there are a particular type of scenarios that get me nauseous in seconds - similar to yours but more narrowly isolated to motion that doesn't match balance sensations. I am fine with games where you run or float as long as it's in the forward direction. But I played some racing simulator the other day with rapid turns and sideways motion against the biological direction that took me an hour to recover from after having the headset on for a few minutes. Pretty big range of response out there.

When I briefly worked in the field the conclusion some others in the studio had come to was it was acceleration that kills you, which makes sense in terms of matching our inner force detectors.

i.e. a fixed forward floating velocity is fine, but whenever it varies you throw up.

They had some rather extreme tests to demonstrate this phenomenon, and no one could last more than a second of one of them (bouncing around in a dune buggy) without tearing the headset off.

One of the slow and quiet phase changes in the industry is IMHO the broader recognition of how to create VR experiences that don't induce motion sickness, such as your example of "you can 'legally' move forward at a constant speed and no-one gets upset", which for instance Pistol Whip puts to good use. That game has never given me trouble.

I got into VR about six months ago with the Quest 3, and for a moment I wondered if all the talk of motion sickness was overblown, or maybe it didn't bother me. So I boldly downloaded a roller coaster simulator. Literally couldn't do more than about 10 seconds of it, even after setting up the blinders (which also effectively ruin the nominal experience anyhow).

So I do think the experiences are getting better about that over time.

However, the problem is, the resulting limitations are a pretty big deal in terms of game design. The VR industry really, REALLY wants to do first-person shooters. I mean, first person, it's almost right there in the name. But the technology that on paper is the very embodiment of "first person" also can't really do that. I've played a bit of Batman on the headset, with it set to 'normal' motion and navigation, and that rides the line of nausea for me, and Batman is really generally a slowly-moving character. I can't imagine trying to do a high-mobility FPS in the style of Quake 1. None of the "I really want to be a first-person shooter" games I've tried really quite work for me. (Have not tried Alyx, admittedly. Next sale. But even if that works, nobody else is copying it very well.)

So if you think of all the possible games, and then remove from them all the games that induce motion sickness, you've cut out rather a lot. Then you face the problem of, of the remaining games, how many of them are actually improved by VR? For instance, you can make a VR chess game, but beyond the initial "oh wow" of the 3D environment, chess is chess, and if anything the VR controls become an impediment versus the precision of the several paradigms for playing chess with mouse and touchscreen that already exist that are able to just fade away until you are just playing chess without thinking about the interface. The VR interface is always there.

The answer is absolutely not zero. Beat Saber, for instance, sure, nominally it could be done in conventional 3d on a 2d monitor and some motion controls, but the millisecond-by-millisecond kinesthetic experience is certainly a qualitative change in VR. It is The Game for a reason. But for VR to ever be more than just a niche, it is going to have to get to the point where it is nearly transparent. We're talking a "VR headset" that is basically the weight and encumbrance of conventional glasses. Maybe a thin wire that goes to a dedicated battery and external compute. If I had something like a dedicated shoulder pocket for that or something it might not be too bad. And we're a ways away from that still. And even then gaming is going to remain a niche unless someone finds a genre that works in VR, doesn't work well without VR, and basically doesn't involve motion through space, and I've got no more idea what that is than most game developers. I just can't entirely exclude its existence.

You should try out Quake3Quest[1]. It's amazing how little motion sickness you get, despite running around and jumping across half the map.

[1] https://quake3quest.quakevr.com/

>> putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today

For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.

That's why I restrict myself to running games standalone on my headset. It just works. Meta got that one right.