Over the last few months, I’ve been dabbling with the Oculus Quest. I bought the unit and played with it for a sizeable amount of time until I didn’t. The problem isn’t that I don’t like it, the problem was that there wasn’t enough to get me to come back to it.
This is a problem with any platform. Yes, you can have fantastic tech and it can be fun but without the content, it’s hard to get people to come back to it. As it stands, I feel like I have all the ‘must-play’ games you should for Oculus Quest. At launch, there were a handful of games worth playing but since then, it’s been pretty quiet. I go back from time to time to see if anything is new in the store but there is nothing there.
I feel this is a problem even for the Oculus Rift, their flagship VR unit. There are not enough games, especially a lack of ‘coming soon’ games that seem appealing or worth considering. While I suspect that games for the Quest require some modifying to work on its limited hardware, it’s a surprise that the Rift isn’t getting the same love.
I’m not entirely sure what the problem is. Is this an issue where there is just not enough interest in VR or are there so few VR developers that it’s not really a surprise we are only seeing a few releases.
Perhaps the issue is still cost. The Quest is not cheap and even investing in PlayStation VR requires a lot up-front. It also doesn’t help that games on the Quest haven’t been discounted and I can’t remember seeing a sale on games in the store. If you want more people playing and you can’t quite cut the cost of hardware, you’ve got to at least take a hit on software to bring people in.
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, I really hope Oculus/Facebook put out an aggressive campaign to get new users to enter the VR landscape. I want more people to own a Quest because it will eventually mean more games.