Valve CEO: It’s okay if virtual reality totally fails

Valve CEO Gabe Newell has said in one of his few interviews that Valve sees virtual reality as something great and that the technology is evolving as expected, but that the company also doesn’t mind if virtual reality ultimately fails.

Newell hinted that the HTC Vive has been a somewhat risky gamble. “If you don’t try things that can fail, you’ll soon be doing little of interest. We hope gamers love it and see it as a step forward. We’re still at the very beginning of development. The Vive is the most expensive device on the market.” the market. The device is barely able to deliver a VR experience in any way adequately. We have to solve all kinds of other problems before we get to the hardware requirements and what exactly could be interesting content,” Newell said in an interview with polygon.

The Valve director acknowledges that good content also forms a barrier for people to purchase a VR headset such as the HTC Vive. He refers to statements by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who stated a few years ago that millions of copies of the Oculus Rift will be sold. Newell doesn’t think this is going to happen that fast. He says he can’t name VR content that makes millions of people decide to buy new hardware.

Despite these statements, Newell still believes in vr. This is partly based on the thirteen hundred VR apps that are available in Steam. In the second half of 2016, the number of monthly active users increased by 86 percent. In addition, there are thirty VR apps that have each generated more than 235,000 euros in revenue on Steam.

Valve released the VR platform Vive together with HTC last year. At the time of writing, the HTC Vive costs 899 euros according to Pricewatch. The HTC Vive competes in particular with the Oculus Rift from Facebook, which is available for more than 600 euros. However, this does not include the controllers and additional sensor for room scaling, which are included in the package with the Vive.