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No, the crazy graphics has ballooned the cost of games so much that it's hurt the industry. Making a 3d game is hard enough, throwing the additional complexity and intricacies on top of that would make it too expensive to be profitable.

Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well.

Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics.

Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.






Production budget != Compute budget. Minecraft, a 15 year old game, runs at 30fps on the Quest2, which will make anyone instantly sick.

Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)


I wasn't using minecraft and pokemon as vr examples, but as examples of good graphics not being a good indicator of a game selling well.

It's interesting, because 3d graphics are already something that games do very well in 2d.

Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective?

I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?


> I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one

Yes, producing two camera views at a time and at pretty high resolution. You can get away with more resolution compromises on a 2D display sitting a couple feet from your eyes versus VR displays hovering just beyond your eyes.


Clearly we just need to make longer VR headsets so that the screen can sit several feet away from your eyes! I see no potential complications or downsides with this plan.

Or wait, even better: scan lines used to allow crts to do more with less. We should really look into using CRT displays for VR headsets


>Clearly we just need to make longer VR headsets so that the screen can sit several feet away from your eyes!

I think the current real-world version of this is called an "IMAX theater". Not very portable though.




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