If you follow VR on social media, you’ll no doubt have seen a PC VR enthusiast claim that what VR “needs” is “just” more high-end PC VR content.
In a rare response on X, the developer of Boneworks and Bonelab explained why studios don’t build VR games to require high-end PC specifications.
When you say PCVR what min spec are you thinking? Quest 3 matches the cpu, ram, gpu, and exceeds the drive speeds of 2016 PCVR min spec, so I assume you’re thinking way beyond that. But what would you suggest the target be in 2025?
— Brandon J Laatsch (@BrandonJLa) February 23, 2025
Extended context: $10M breaks even at 416k sales at a $40 price. Very few VR games are achieving that so it’s mega risky even at $10M.
— Brandon J Laatsch (@BrandonJLa) February 23, 2025
In the posts, Brandon J Laatsch explains that for a game to even target Quest 3 & Quest 3S and above, excluding Quest 2, a studio could justify a $10 million budget at most. This hypothetical game would need to sell 416K copies at $40 to break even, which “very few” games of this sort are achieving.
Even with the shifting winds of the open store and Horizon Worlds push, most developers still see the majority of their revenue from Quest. Not supporting it at all would mean the budget of the game would need to “proportionately come down”, Laatsch explains, leading to a game with reduced scope, scale, and fidelity. Laatsch calls this “a challenging puzzle to maximize”.
Currently less than 2% of Steam uses a VR headset in a given month, or less than 3% if adjusting for Chinese users, and this number hasn’t notably shifted for years now. For high production value VR games to be built around PC VR, without funding from a platform holder like Valve, that number would need to significantly increase. Some had hoped that a new Valve headset might drive it up, but rumors of a $1200 price have taken many by surprise.
