Oculus does not want to discourage developers from making their games and content obsolete when the next version of Rift comes out. So today at the Oculus Connect 5 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that "future versions of our product will be compatible with the previous ones." All the content that works for Rifts will work in the next version. "
That next version of the Oculus headset will be called Quest and will come out in the spring. It is wireless, it will be distributed with touch controllers and there will be more than 50 titles available at launch.
Compatibility strategy is related to Zuckerberg's prediction that the virtual reality industry needs around 10 million users on a given hardware platform to generate enough sales for content creation to be sustainable. Discussing the slow adoption of virtual reality, Zuckerberg said that last year Oculus set the goal of making one billion people participate in virtual reality. He joked that this trip is "finished at one percent" or "perhaps less than one percent".
At this time, most virtual reality titles are created by independent studies and funded by initiatives such as Oculus Drive to invest $ 3 billion in virtual reality over the next decade. This is because there are not enough headset owners who buy content to make the business profitable. There are already 1100 Rift titles available, but they ran the risk of not being able to reproduce as the hardware advances.
Of course, if Oculus really had everything included in compatibility, it would try to work with Playstation VR and HTC Vive to make experiences easier to transport across platforms. But for now, simply knowing that they will not have to re-encode their content each year could make developers more confident in creating the immersive medium.
