Only a *moron* would call VR a 'fad'. VR is a technology- now thanks to products like the Vive, Rift and the misnamed MS MR (with its perfect inside out tracking) very well defined.
As a technology, VR only had to reach certain points of achievement. Tracking was a big deal- and that is now amazing. Sub-pixel stability. The quality of display and power of the system driving the display matters, of course- but now both rely on standard non-VR advances in the tech industry.
The PS5 and AMD's tech will make VR more mainstream than ever- up til today the no.1 problem in VR has been Nvidia, and the rotten games that company plays in *collapsing* rendering performance in order to sell massively over-priced ultra-high-end solutions. This paradigm doesn't apply to console hardware tho. And if AMD has implemented a GPU per eye solution for PS5 VR, VR rendering will take a very happy leap.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Nvidia to support and promote one GPU per eye- but two low end cards are *far* faster than one high end card at *far* less than the high end card sells for- and Nvidia thus *hates* any method that lets you use two or more cards in gaming.
Idiots claim VR either has the hours per month usage of trad 2D gaming or it is a 'flop'. While headsets remain 'oppressive' (heavy with sweat issues in warm environments), most gamers would VR game for the highly 'special' experience, like seeing some films at the cinema, but still expect to do most gaming 2D. But VR 'hobbyiests' like hard core flight sim peeps, will have a room decked out just for VR to spend long room scale immersion periods in open world games.
The success of VR was always two lines finally crossing over- as with most tech products. One line is the classic negatives, that must reduce with time. The other the classic positives that must increase with time.
Mouthbreathers said portable computers would never take off, when the first were 'luggables' with the size and weight of a small filled suitcase. They actually said the same thing about the modern Internet - and how vividly I recall that *fact* having used the net from shortly after wen the very first web pages went live.
Such idiots take a pride in being stupid. But the psychology is interesting. They usually know someone who uses the thing they criticise, and have a personal animosity with that person. So they laughably try to convert that animosity into a wider philosophical 'debate'.
I'll say this about VR. It stands where shooter 3D games stood *before* Doom and then Quake. Lots of 3D games had been made earlier- all of them highly unsatisfactory from a conceptual position- especially control. *lookspring*, the breakthru method of using keyboard to move and mouse to look around, changed everything.
The data structure design of Doom and Quake changed everything.
All of a sudden everyone knew how to do continuous area 3D games on a computer, and have them compelling.
VR games are at the pre-Doom stage. Too many are just a dumb conversion of 2d-monitor games- especially since the traditional '3D' game can be trivially ported to stereo. This is a giant mistake. What is fun on a monitor is not worthwhile in VR. The gimmick of stereo rendering is not the point of VR. VR *must* be about unique VR suitable game play mechanisms- things only possible in VR.
Nvidia's *murder* of real physics in computer games for the last decade now has a big impact. Thanks to Nvidia, actual game coders don't even consider real physics in VR. Its as if they think it has been proven that gamers do not want real physics. Only slowly is the cancerous effect of Nvidia fading, and game coders begiining to think "maybe gamers are OK with physics afterall".
Today it is chicken and egg for VR software. Good games will drive VR sales, but low current VR sales makes the incentive to develop good VR software low. The PS5 will change this- as Sony provides stable income to the best VR games devs. And while I'm certain RDR2 VR will be a massive day one Sony 'exclusive' (Rockstar has spent a fortune on VR dev), the PS5 will have a ton of true VR games that are not just ports.
