“People will fall for it like a drug”—Game devs on the future of VR

Sam Machkovech

Say hello to the HTC Vive Pre-the near-final version of the VR system. The headset comes complete with two tracking wands and two laser-tracking stations.

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Nine years ago, when the first iPhone was about to debut, not many people envisioned a revolution that would fundamentally change the shape of the game industry (for good or for ill). Today, as we await the impending release of high-end consumer virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus, Valve, and Sony, it feels like we're at a similar crossroads.

Unlike the slow, quiet dawn of smartphone gaming, the hype around VR has been building to a relentless, deafening pitch for years. Yet despite this hype, the industry and those watching it seem relatively split on the eventual impact of VR gaming. It could be a smartphone-level technological change-the biggest the gaming industry has seen in years-or it could be a quickly irrelevant fad on the order of the Wii or Kinect.

The answer to that question will determine the state of the video game market for years to come. So as many of the industry's biggest names gathered for the DICE Summit and Awards ceremony in late February, I asked everyone I could get my hands on what they thought virtual reality gaming would look like a decade from now. The range of responses shows just how unsettled, and unsettling, the fate of the latest virtual reality boom really is.

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