... But it IS the future of simming.
I believe this is true. Consider:
VR headset sales forecasts for 2016 (alone) vary significantly but that said, they
will be significant.
One projection forecasts
2016 sales of the Rift and the Vive at a combined volume of
4.7 MILLION UNITS [1]. Business Daily projects a more conservative forecast of
1.7 MILLION UNITS of PC-tethered AND console headsets combined [2].
Let’s take a
WAG and assume both of those projections are overestimates and only 1 million units are sold in 2016. Say that half of that number are console-based headsets, leaving 500,000 PC-tethered headsets as the
2016 sales figure of consequence to a game like Aces High. (I personally believe that number has already been significantly exceeded). Assume further that 20% of the 500,000 will be for purchased solely for business, government & education uses, leaving 400,000 as consumer purchased headsets and that only 5% of those 400,000 buyers will be game players interested in playing air combat games (likely a very low figure). That leaves a prospective market (again, generated from 2016 sales) of 20,000 game enthusiasts to which a game like Aces High could be marketed on the basis of VR support. (Again, the preceding was just a guess)
Now since that was just a WAG, I could be very far off in either direction--low or high--but according to The Verge, HTC /Samsung sold 15,000 units of the Vive
within 10 minutes of having gone on sale [3] (and that figure doesn’t even consider how many Rifts were sold during the same time frame). So that even if these are just early adopter sales that taper off over time, that sales volume indicates that PC-based VR headset sales will probably exceed the WAG figure.
Like it or not and ready or not, it’s something to prepare for because VR could spell a rebirth for the flight sim genre. And btw, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think that this possible boom has been lost on the developers of DCS, WT or good ol' AH either.
Sources:
[1]
http://www.statista.com/statistics/458037/virtual-reality-headsets-unit-sales-worldwide/[2]
http://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/virtual-reality-headset-sales-seen-reaching-895-million-this-year/[3]
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/1/11143628/htc-vive-15000-sold-in-first-10-minutesFWIW,
