Storefronts and HMDs
It's probably true that the Oculus store has more exclusives and apparently locks out other headsets, though Pimax seemed to find a way in and Revive works very well for most things. Steam on the other hand appears to welcome all HMDs though I've seen some Rift owners be unhappy without 'native' Rift support. With PSVR and even LaboVR now, it's not just the Oculus and Steam storefronts offering us our games.Regardless of the practice of exclusives, I've seen people considering the storefront when deciding on their next HMD purchase. For me, there isn't significant enough difference in the catalogues for it to have much impact on my decision and I've chosen the HMD I feel is right for me based only on the tech.
There are no shortage of articles listing the best VR games. I'll choose this one:
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/1649-best-vr-games.html
While there are exclusives listed, none of them alone could sway my decision one way or another.
If the HMDs were roughly equivalent then I guess we would all choose based on storefront but as the price and performance of the HMDs are in such different places and we mostly all have ways into the other storefronts the storefront barely factors into my consideration when deciding upon an HMD. Am I an oddball here? Well I ALWAYS buy games from ANYWHERE apart from Steam because in terms of software and their Store, Steam, they haven't made ANY sort of effort so far.
The Lab was GREAT, but it was just a collection of tech demos at the end of the day.
Oculus and Facebook have actually put some EFFORT into funding developers and actually CURATING their Store. When you buy something from the Oculus Store you know that you're going to get a decent software experience whereas with Steam 98% of games available from there are complete sh*te.
I'll ALWAYS buy from the Oculus Store whenever possible, because they're investing that money back into the system instead of lining their pockets, and if there's a SteamVR exclusive that I want to play I'll buy it from a third party site like GMG so that Valve don't see a penny of it.
And Valve not having Half Life 2 VR available on day one of both the Rift and Vive launching, or SINCE launching, is UNFORGIVABLE in my book. Valve are a complete bunch of ****s as far as I'm concerned.
Now I THOUGHT that there was a chance of me ending my Valve boycott that I've had in place for a while with the upcoming release of the Valve Index, but not only have they decided to release a headset that's only 1600p, they've also decided to price gouge the fudgeing thing. ******s. Stress Level Zero (Hover Junkers, Duck Season, Boneworks) and Cloudhead Games (The Gallery Ep1 and Ep2, Aperture Hand Labs), to name but two, appear to be well supported by Valve.
In the early days (circa 2015) Valve were keenly collaborating with Oculus and Luckey was speaking at Steam developer days. The following slide was a very quick google find. That all soured when Facebook got involved though.
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To claim Valve "haven't made ANY sort of effort so far" is unjustified IMO. However, we don't have to agree and I reckon there are plenty of people who won't go near Facebook for 'reasons'. And a personal objection to a company's practice is a legitimate reason for a storefront to be considered when buying an HMD. I wonder if, before Facebook got involved, Oculus had no plans for a store of their own.
Is funny, the Facebook thing. For a company that so many people object to, it has a heck of a lot of users.
I'm not one of them, never have been, never plan to be. Maybe that makes it easier for me to keep them separate. I generally just stick to Steam for all my games where possible, VR or not. I haaaate having to have every frikkin' storefront have its own continually-updating agent running in the background with flakey game-crashing overlays and online chat annoyances (Steam is guilty of this as well).
In terms of VR, will never buy something from Oculus. Simply-put, if they don't support my headset, they won't get my money. Being that you don't actually own your software anymore, also got to consider which store will actually last longer in the long run. @ArmitageShanks so your preference for Steam, would that prevent you buying a Rift if the hardware specs and price were right for you? Not at all - if I thought the Rift/Rift S was the device for me, I'd probably buy from both Oculus and Steam like others have done since both have developers actively supporting the device.
I actually think the Rift S is a pretty neat piece of hardware in terms of design - it's far, far simpler technically and less resource-hungry than the original Rift. That's not to say it's without its flaws (audio, tracking, etc), but it's what I would recommend to anyone getting started with PC VR looking for a good mid-range setup without blowing their budget - it's good enough (or better than) the majority of currently-available HMDs.
However, I don't believe Facebook will continue to produce PC VR headsets in future (contrary to popular believe, most proof-of-concept designs don't make it to market). The PC VR market is just not big enough for their liking, and as I've said before, they can't exercise any real control over it - these are things that investors get upset about unfortunately. The Quest is far more likely to be their VR bread-and-butter going forward IMO. I don't disagree with you and I'm remembering this article from UploadVR (from before the Index was unveiled) so I don't think you're alone:
https://uploadvr.com/oculus-rift-s-quest-facebook/
Concern for long term support is definitely something to consider when choosing an HMD. Though I don't think Facebook (if they do lose interest in PC VR) would completely pull the plug on the store, it would just see very few new high fidelity releases, more ported Quest releases. You'd likely still be able to purchase and play games from Steam for the long term. If Sony lose interest in VR the PSVR owners are screwed. Though console owners must have got used to the risk of obsolete peripherals by now. Like I've said previously they won't abandon PC VR anytime soon. They will, however, start to decrease their funding for big name titles like we've seen such as Lone Echo, Stormland etc because in a year or so they won't need to - as more headsets get sold big publishers will start to pick up the slack with their own big name titles, they'll first develop hybrid games that can be played both flat and in VR but during the next 10-15 years or so publishers will switch 100% to releasing VR games.
The key parts of publishers switching to VR exclusive development will be threefold:
1) Microsoft bringing a VR headset to their Xbox console and
2) The price of technology coming down
3) There being over 10m headsets in use on heads out there.
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