Oculus Miffed

This year, rather than writing our own predictions, we decided to have Motherboard interview each other. In this installment, contributing editor Sarah Jeong wrote out a bunch of extremely insightful questions about video games and culture and human behavior, and then just ended up gabbing about Oculus Rift with weekend and games editor Emanuel Maiberg for an hour.

SARAH JEONG: Let's talk about Oculus!

Oculus just announced that the Rift will be available for purchase, for $600. At that price point, are people really going to buy Oculus?

EMANUEL MAIBERG:Well, yeah, some people are going to buy an Oculus Rift—these are people who already play games on high-end PCs.

This will be a small audience compared to, say, the people who buy new consoles like the PS4 or Xbox One, or the people who buy new iPhones when they come out. My bet is that for now, it will be a small audience compared to pretty much any audience for any other consumer electronic.

As people are already pointing out right now, $600 for an Oculus Rift won't get you going out of the box. You need a pretty powerful PC. My PC isn't powerful enough, and it runs most current games just fine.

Palmer [Luckey, inventor of Oculus Rift] is saying you can get an "Oculus ready" PC + an Oculus Rift for like $1,500 total. That sounds about right, but you could easily spend more.

Short version: Oculus Rift and virtual reality gaming in general is going to be expensive for a while, and that's going to keep the masses away. Palmer knows this and has said as much.

Right now people are flinging around names of various devices and their prices to try to situate the relative cost of the Oculus or predict where the price is going—like pointing out that the Kindle started off at $400, and is now available for $80. Then there are smartphones, which are still quite expensive but have replaced many other gadgets and have become so culturally significant so the price tag no longer shocks.

This is an interesting thought experiment, but isn't it a bit fruitless? The Oculus isn't a Kindle, the Oculus isn't a smartphone, and the Oculus definitely isn't a home computer or a car or a refrigerator. Do you think any analogy in this vein is enlightening as far as predictions go?

I think there is something to the smartphone comparison. A lot of the tech is similar: the devices are small, they use very high-res screens, they have motion sensors.

You also get the impression from everyone who's investing in VR, that they think of it as a technology that will be just as influential and pervasive as smartphones… eventually. But I see your point. It is a different thing. There are different challenges for the Oculus Rift and I don't know if you can just assume that the price will go down a year from now, or two years from now.

They'll have to keep improving the tech that goes into the device. Like an iPhone, right? Like a new iPhone is still $600. And the next iPhone will probably be $600 as well.

The screens are a big part of this, and one of the biggest technological challenges for virtual reality right now is screen resolution. You can take the highest res screens on the market right now, but when you put them right next to your eyeballs, it's gonna look pixelated.

So if Oculus released another Rift model a year from now, hopefully it would have a higher res screen, which would be more expensive.

Michael Abrash, the chief scientist at Oculus, had some interesting numbers about this:

So I'm assuming the journey to that resolution will keep prices up there.

[Motherboard editor] Nicholas Deleon suggested that for the next few years, most people would only be able to do VR gaming in cyber cafes. It would be a return to the arcade era. What are your thoughts on that?

That idea makes sense in a lot of ways. How long do you really want to be inside a headset when you're at home?

Oof, depends on whether or not World of Warcraft will be on Oculus. All bets are off after that.

Haha. But like, if you're playing WoW, and something catches fire in real life, you'll notice. With Oculus, it will take a bit of time. I'm imagining that a 30 minute session will feel like a long time to be completely separated from reality.

An arcade or cybercafe also allows VR experiences to be more elaborate. Both Oculus and Vive, HTC and Valve's headset, are working on motion controls, which are really cool, but require a lot of space, space that I don't have in my apartment. Like Vive is literally expecting to you to dedicate a small room to their special controllers, so you can walk around and stuff.

That's not a very realistic thing for most people to do, I think.

Also, if you have a cybercafe situation, you can build really crazy things, like Birdly.

In my experience, the more you're allowed to move, the more your body movements match your movements in virtual reality, the better it feels—like Virtuix Omni. (Which looks very much like the kind of VR experiences you saw in the 90s). (Which is the whole problem here).

The cybercafe thing makes sense for the reasons I mentioned, it solves the price problem for sure, but Facebook did not buy Oculus for $2 billion to get into the "amusement business" as people who own arcade and pinball machines call it.

Obvious follow-up into highly speculative territory: so what did Facebook buy Oculus for?

So I feel like this gets into why some people are having a negative reaction to the $600 price tag right now. When Mark Zuckerberg talks about VR he talks about it in the classic Silicon Valley style of it changing the world.

Needless to say, Facebook has had a big impact on the way people connect. I puke a little in my mouth repeating their philosophy that way but it's not entirely untrue, right? Like even if you can't be a Pokemon on Facebook, there's no denying the impact. It's the social platform.

And when Zuckerberg talks about VR, he's suggesting that is the future of communication. Like a natural extension of Facebook as a social platform.

Your grandma is on Facebook. It's how she keeps up with your antics. She likes your pictures. In the future, you'll share 360° videos with her, or maybe you'll hang out in a virtual space together and play Farmville together or some shit. That's the dream, that's the way VR proponents talk about it.

But there's such a huge gap between your grandma in virtual reality and the price Oculus announced today. Your grandma isn't buying a $1500 Alienware gaming PC with water cooling and neon lighting.

[Caption: "Grandmas love VR." - Emanuel Maiberg"]

Do you think this points to—for a lack of a better term—the death of the middle class of gaming? Video games are bigger than ever before, but a lot of that has to do with the combination of pervasive smartphone ownership and the rise of mobile games. The everyman has Candy Crush and Farmville, and only an elite few will have Oculus.

I think for now at least, Oculus for sure is an "elite" device. But you do already have a cheaper option with the GearVR, or Cardboard VR, or whatever. It's not like people are completely shut out of VR for now unless they want to invest thousands of dollars.

I just personally find those experiences to be kind of lame. It's a cool gimmick, but I need something more involved like the Oculus Rift to keep me interested in VR. I think the novelty you can get out of GearVR or Cardboard will get old very quickly for most people.

As for this divide you're describing in general, I think really what you're going to see is a wider spectrum. You'll have people who play only smartphone games, people who play on somewhat affordable home consoles, and nutjobs like myself who'll invent way too much time and money on PC games.

The audience for games is always growing, but it's growing more in new areas, like social and mobile. It makes the console/PC/"hardcore" audience seem smaller by comparison, but I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Was the Oculus acquisition dumb? Integral to Facebook's future? A reasonable, but highly overhyped move?

Man…

The original phrasing to this question was "On a scale of Yahoo to Google, how dumb was the Oculus acquisition?"

Haha.

That's tough. The responsible thing to say is that it's way too soon to say.

It's fine if you don't want to answer! I think mostly I'm wondering how much of the $600 backlash is just trying to make sense of the acquisition in the first place.

No, no. Let me just go all out and probably come out like an idiot.

From Oculus's perspective, and from the perspective of people who really want VR gaming to work out (including myself), the benefit of the acquisition is that Facebook would help Oculus realize its vision right?

And one of the ways it was supposedly going to do this is to subsidize the Rift. Maybe it did, I don't know. But at $600 it certainly doesn't feel subsidized. Keep in mind the development kits cost $350-ish!

The other benefit is that the Facebook acquisition could support Oculus for the long term. Like if Zuck believes in it, maybe they can make some 10 year plan, and maybe that's what we're seeing right now.

This is a very small first step: get Oculus to the elite few, get feedback, figure out what kind of experiences these early adopters are looking for, and use that information to prepare a better launch for the masses at a lower price.

But then again, what if this first batch of Rifts ship out, and there's no good games to play, and people hate it. And then people stop buying them? Does Facebook keep pouring money into this because they believe is some dorky ass vision of the Metaverse? I don't think so.

At some point, someone at Facebook asks, "Are we selling ads on this gamer goggles bullshit y/n?" And if the answer is n…

Alright, last set of questions. Do you think Oculus is the most exciting thing in gaming right now?

Nah, not even close.

What is?

Oh my god, so many things.

Pretty much anything else.

The fact that the audience is changing. The fact that the tools for making games are getting in the hands of more people. The distribution methods. ESports. The fact that big budget games and consoles seem like kind of an old model.

I have yet to see the game or demo that proves why VR is worth $600 or $1,500 or whatever price you want to put on it. I'm pretty confident that demo or game doesn't exist.

This tech is very interesting. If you imagine, vaguely, what virtual reality gaming can mean, it's exciting. But nobody knows what to do with this tech yet. That doesn't mean we won't figure it out. I hope we do.

But I guess it's kinda funny to see what waves this price is making when you consider all the other challenges ahead of virtual reality. Resolution, content, input methods. And health! We don't really know what's going to happen to me once I start playing VR for three hours a day or whatever. These are way bigger issues.

Any last words?

I feel like I always come out as a hater when talking about VR.

I very much want it to work out.

You can't be a person who likes games who grew up in the 90s and not want VR to work out.