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Cloud Mario, from Super Mario Galaxy 2

Virtual reality was a major topic at E3 this year, thanks to PC gaming's renewed spotlight, Sony's upcoming PlayStation VR, and Microsoft talking up VR capabilities every bit office of Project Scorpio. Nintendo of America's CEO Reggie Fils-Aime isn't interested in virtual reality, withal — at least non notwithstanding.

"In my judgment, I recall VR is a bit farther out there for mainstream, mass market applications and applications that consumers can invest a lot of fourth dimension in versus short snacks of entertainment," Fils-Aime told Bloomberg.

"For u.s.a., we want to make sure that technology is mainstream," Fils-Aime continued. "We want to make sure the engineering represents strong value to the consumer… So the mode we expect at VR or even AR… for united states the technology has to exist at a point where it tin can be mainstream, and so information technology takes content creating companies like us to really make things that the consumer wants to experience, that they want to jump into the particular applied science."

Reggie-Fils-Aime

Reggie Fils-Aime

VR has generated tremendous hype and optimism in the PC infinite and major companies like Sony and Microsoft are clearly angling to position themselves to take advantage of it — but when Fils-Aime talks almost waiting for the technology to mature before taking a serious bet on it, he'south arguably making a smart business organization move.

What qualifies as mainstream VR?

Fils-Aime'southward comments may not be particularly popular, but they're probably accurate. AMD is publicly focused on bringing proficient VR performance to lower cost points, while Nvidia'due south recent GPU launches take focused more than on improving VR performance at the meridian of the stack. Fifty-fifty if AMD's RX 480 is a summit-notch VR performer, all the same, it's nonetheless a $200 GPU on top of a $600 – $800 headset purchase (though the Vive does ship with motion controls). Either style, if you need a GPU upgrade, VR is anything but cheap. Even Sony'southward PlayStation VR, which is currently the cheapest mainstream solution, will set you dorsum over $500 if you don't take any of the required peripherals. That's in improver to the price of the PS4 itself, which volition run you $350.

The loftier cost of purchase-in is going to go on VR confined to a specific elite segment of the market for the time existence, and that, in plough, is going to shape how content rolls out. Even if we were to assume that VR would curl out equally apace as 3D accelerated graphics did in the tardily 1990s, nosotros're looking at a ramp-up menstruum of several years. While we typically care for game history as though the unabridged industry converted to 3D dispatch after getting a good look at GLQuake, the truth is much more nuanced: While FPS games moved to 3D acceleration adequately quickly, thank you in part to strong support from id-based engines, other games took much longer. Classic titles like Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Age of Empires, Sim City 3000, and dozens of others either didn't utilize 3D dispatch at all or provided it as a minimally-improved afterthought on classic software rendering. It took roughly iv years for 3D gaming to truly go mainstream.

VirtualBoy

Nintendo's final foray into VR was so disastrous, the visitor may nevertheless be gun-shy.

Sony clearly hopes to get an early on leg into the VR business and become the go-to company associated with VR content. Microsoft seems to biding its fourth dimension, simply planning to enter the market past 2022, which may also permit it to striking lower price points and offer more attractive hardware. Nintendo, which already has one "reinvented" console in the works with its NX, may desire to wait and meet how the market shakes out for that platform before diving into something else, particularly given how badly the visitor got burned in including 3D capabilities in the Nintendo 3DS.

At that time, all market research and analyst projections pointed to 3D equally the "Adjacent Big Thing" — and those projections turned out to be laughably off-base of operations. While the 3DS has become a well-established platform, it never came close to matching the meteoric success of the Nintendo DS. The company's decision to play it a bit safer this time around makes sense given the bug it had in the 3D market.