As someone who has >1000 hours in VR (and is also a game developer), the simple answer is that there really have been only maybe a dozen games. And lots of mostly identical alternatives.
Boneworks/HL:Alyx/Pavlov: Shooter, VRChat/RecRoom/etc: Social, Beat Saber/Harmonix somethingsomething: Rythm, The Room, Jet Island... Where each of those alternatives have lots of mechanical convergence, so it "feels" like playing the same game if you overlook the button mapping of the controllers.
The tech works perfectly fine, but there are so many caveats and limitations that the possible design space is quite limited, or there has been too much inbreeding. Plus, developing for VR is much more expensive as a baseline because of the increased limitations, so you end up with generally lower quality games than a traditional medium.
All in all, I would say that in a scale from "Pong" (1972) to "Outer Wilds" (2019) we are maybe just after "Wolfenstein 3D" (1992) in relation to the VR gaming landscape: Games are fun, but most of everything is really bad and played out of a lack of better options, or a clone of something actually cool.
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My point here is I don't entirely agree with you it's a novelty, I would say it's more of a variation that can become a staple with many people, but will never* be the main/only medium. Pizza, not bread&butter.
(And yes, that's half the definition of a novelty, but that's why I say I don't entirely agree with calling it such)
* Unless we invent the actual Matrix "full-body immersion with motor suspension" tech or something functionally equivalent (and I'm not even saying that's a good idea).
What strikes me as different from 1992-era games (and more like 1990s VR) is consistency of play. Even with the earlier generation of games, like NES titles or early Mac/PC games, you saw people putting in a lot of time over consistent periods. For many, video games replaced, say, board games. From what I see here and elsewhere, there are very few consistent VR users.
Maybe that's just down to the cost factors you describe. And maybe that's down to the competition being much better between modern consoles and the vast array of mobile games.
So I can believe you're right, it might be another way of gaming, coexisting in the same way that the PS5 and the Switch and phone games all coexist happily. But given the extra cost for both users and developers, it seems to me that it's also possible that there's a vicious circle ahead: High costs mean fewer games and fewer users. That leads to lower revenue, which means even fewer games, and therefore even fewer users.
At this point we must be somewhere near $50 billion invested in VR. If that level of subsidy isn't enough to get things going, I'm sure there are lots of CFOs asking exactly what it's going to take their VR units to become cash positive.
Boneworks/HL:Alyx/Pavlov: Shooter, VRChat/RecRoom/etc: Social, Beat Saber/Harmonix somethingsomething: Rythm, The Room, Jet Island... Where each of those alternatives have lots of mechanical convergence, so it "feels" like playing the same game if you overlook the button mapping of the controllers.
The tech works perfectly fine, but there are so many caveats and limitations that the possible design space is quite limited, or there has been too much inbreeding. Plus, developing for VR is much more expensive as a baseline because of the increased limitations, so you end up with generally lower quality games than a traditional medium.
All in all, I would say that in a scale from "Pong" (1972) to "Outer Wilds" (2019) we are maybe just after "Wolfenstein 3D" (1992) in relation to the VR gaming landscape: Games are fun, but most of everything is really bad and played out of a lack of better options, or a clone of something actually cool.
---
My point here is I don't entirely agree with you it's a novelty, I would say it's more of a variation that can become a staple with many people, but will never* be the main/only medium. Pizza, not bread&butter.
(And yes, that's half the definition of a novelty, but that's why I say I don't entirely agree with calling it such)
* Unless we invent the actual Matrix "full-body immersion with motor suspension" tech or something functionally equivalent (and I'm not even saying that's a good idea).