The Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg says the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset could be the future of the internet….
But on the Virtual Reality front, to get there, he needs to do battle with the entire gaming industry.
The Rift’s biggest challenge isn’t getting the technology right.
Instead, the make-or-break issue will be beating the competition and winning the hearts of developers, as swarms of technology majors pour billions into rolling out their own virtual reality devices. And unlike Oculus and its parent company Facebook, the competition has a track record of pushing out devices and games that reach, and delight, the mass market. At the Consumer Electronic Show this week in Las Vegas, manufacturers are expected to show off a wave of VR devices — and Oculus, too, will be there.
The Rift faces the tech industry’s perennial technology chicken-and-egg scenario: To get software developers on board, you need your devices in the hands of a critical mass of consumers — and consumers gravitate toward devices that have the best software. Facebook has many things going for it: near limitless cash, a visionary leader, a deep pool of technical talent. But it has no experience building or publishing games, which in the early days will be the killer app of virtual reality headsets.
With the competition racing to define the market, Facebook has rapidly begun working on developing its own software.
For now, the most formidable Rift competitor is Sony and its Morpheus VR headset. Through the PlayStation, Sony has a proven history of driving the adoption of new hardware, and whenever a new console comes out, Sony can lean on decades of relationships in the video game industry. On top of that are the game development studios it owns, which can finance to create massive sales-drivers like Uncharted and The Last of Us. That financing doesn’t just fund large development studios, but also massive marketing and advertising campaigns that can span from billboards to television and the Internet — and potentially even Facebook itself.
Sony, too, has already demoed launch titles for the Morpheus, like Eve Valkyrie, a space-piloting game that’s a spin-off of Eve Online — a game beloved by a niche of hardcore players who devote hundreds of hours to playing. Square Enix, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, has also planned to launch a version of Thief.
Other competitors are also trying to get in on the action. Samsung released its own virtual reality system, the Gear VR, which connects Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 to a headset powered by software from Oculus VR. Samsung might not fall directly into the category of competitor due to its partnership with Oculus VR, but the company has massive production and distribution channels and knows how to push devices through global retail channels in huge volumes. The company’s Galaxy Note phones are often credited with creating the market for larger “phablet”-sized phones.
And the competition could potentially expand beyond simple VR headsets. Magic Leap, a tight-lipped company specializing in augmented reality, raised $542 million in a financing round last year that Google led. The search giant had previously created an augmented-reality device of its own, Google Glass, which has so far failed to create an enthusiastic user base.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges the challenge. “It needs to reach a very large scale, 50 million units to 100 million units, before it’ll really be a very meaningful thing as a computing platform,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call last year. “So I do think it’s going to take a bunch of years to get there. Maybe, I don’t know, it’s hard to predict exactly, but I don’t think it’s going to get to 50 million units or 100 million units in the next few years.”
Zuckerberg’s vision for Oculus Rift isn’t necessarily restricted to games. And the applications for the Rift could very well go beyond simply video games; Zuckerberg himself has said it is essentially a bet on the future of the internet. But device adoption has historically been driven by games, whether with consoles or smartphones, and in getting into the console business, Facebook faces one of the greatest competitive challenges in its 10-year history.
It all makes for a frenzied environment among game makers. “The entire industry is exploding behind closed doors,” Cloudhead Games Creative Director Denny Unger, whose company is developing for Oculus Rift, told BuzzFeed News. “You have [Samsung’s] Gear VR, you have Oculus, you have Morpheus — which we’re developing for as well. There’s a number of other players that are working on stuff in secret; it’s this maelstrom of innovation happening at the same time. As a developer it’s tricky to hedge your bets on one system.”
SOURCE: Buzzfeed com