...in my research I found the iPhone 7 in a viewer is near resolution to the Oculus, and so (to be fair without trying either) I ask why would one invest in an Oculus...? I look forward to any rumours of an Apple Zeiss venture coming to fruition for the 'next big thing', (VR vs AR/AI) as long as privacy is the default - opt in only... Is always on Photos tagging is absolutely an assault on Mac user privacy? When did mail lose the ability to purge unused email addresses ? The bricks in the wall...?
Just over 350,000 Rift's were sold in 2016, much less than Sony and HTC.
That's always the main issue with supporting relatively lower unit volume platforms like the Mac. Some companies even stop supporting their own products:
Mac unit volume vs Windows is still around 1:10-20 so 350k sold to PCs would be 17-35k to Macs and it wouldn't be that much because the higher performing hardware is at a higher price point. Apple sells that many Macs in a single day and that would be a year of sales for Oculus.
Consoles can do a bit better with VR because they can push good software that is well optimized but it's still hard to use VR for long periods of time. Even 10 minutes is enough to make people nauseous. It's really best suited for very limited, targeted experiences. Resident Evil 7 would be a good example where it's a horror game set in a very enclosed environment, over 100k people have played that in VR.
Spliff Monkey said: Just because Steve thought games were trivial Apple ignored them for years for various reasons. Good thing they didn't listen to Steve when it came to iPhone games. He hated the idea.
It wasn't always the case. He worked for Atari early on and here he is talking about Apple's need to focus on games:
The target was to get 9/10 of the best PC games on the Mac. I would expect their opinions to change as they got older. Everybody views things from their own perspective first and when you work a lot and have a lot of responsibilities, games don't factor in much. Their children would reinforce the need for games but then there's the type and quality of the games. iOS has hundreds of thousands of games but they are widely categorized as shovelware, i.e low budget, mass volume to get the best ROI with the hope of having some random hit and a huge payoff.
High budget (AAA) tends to be the focus on the main gaming platforms. The most recent example would be Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild that took 4 years to make. Games like that aren't available on iOS. This is to do with how much the games cost to make vs how much the audience is willing to pay for it.
This means the development budget was over $120m and the game will sell at $60. iOS games could never sell for $60 but they can sell in a higher volume. Mario Run made $53m. That's about 7.5m paid copies (assuming the revenue is 70% of $10) out of 78 million downloads. People still complained that $10 was a ripoff, which is crazy relative to the overall games industry.
There's a lot of risk involved in developing high production value content of any kind. If it's not popular then a single production can bankrupt a company. The safer route is to aim for lower volume, high price and target an audience that really wants the product. That's effectively what Apple does with hardware but it means there's a smaller audience for developers to target. With mobile hardware they have managed to hit a very good balance between price, unit volume and quality but the mobile audience pays less per user. 1 billion users, $28b revenue = $28 each per year.
I don't think the Mac platform is as bad as it could be for games. Linux is far worse despite having the benefit of cheaper hardware. There are a lot of good game ports for the Mac thanks to Feral and Aspyr who cherry-pick the better games to port. Given Apple's resources, I don't see the harm in them putting some effort behind that. Just commission ports of games to both Mac and iOS capped at maybe $5-10m per port and they recoup most of it with the app store fees.
When it comes to hardware, I don't see this as being an issue these days. The highest MBP can handle high-end games at 1080p:
That's an 8TFLOP GPU. The top Mac Pro dual GPU from 3 years ago is 7TFLOP. The iMac tends to be 3x the MBP so maybe 5-6TFLOP but it could probably handle a 1080 notebook level GPU. Price is more important a consideration than the performance, the highest-end MBP and iMac are above $2k, which limits the audience for higher end graphics. This price point was mentioned in the video above too.
VR doesn't have a wide enough appeal for either Apple or Oculus to support it on the Mac. High performance GPUs are always useful but the next couple of generations of GPUs are going to be pretty much peak level for what people need when they can run high-end games at 4K at 60FPS.
Comments
I look forward to any rumours of an Apple Zeiss venture coming to fruition for the 'next big thing', (VR vs AR/AI) as long as privacy is the default - opt in only...
Is always on Photos tagging is absolutely an assault on Mac user privacy? When did mail lose the ability to purge unused email addresses ? The bricks in the wall...?
https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/19/microsoft-drops-support-for-minecraft-windows-phone/
Mac unit volume vs Windows is still around 1:10-20 so 350k sold to PCs would be 17-35k to Macs and it wouldn't be that much because the higher performing hardware is at a higher price point. Apple sells that many Macs in a single day and that would be a year of sales for Oculus.
Consoles can do a bit better with VR because they can push good software that is well optimized but it's still hard to use VR for long periods of time. Even 10 minutes is enough to make people nauseous. It's really best suited for very limited, targeted experiences. Resident Evil 7 would be a good example where it's a horror game set in a very enclosed environment, over 100k people have played that in VR.
It wasn't always the case. He worked for Atari early on and here he is talking about Apple's need to focus on games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJKmnKbx-aE&t=3847
The target was to get 9/10 of the best PC games on the Mac. I would expect their opinions to change as they got older. Everybody views things from their own perspective first and when you work a lot and have a lot of responsibilities, games don't factor in much. Their children would reinforce the need for games but then there's the type and quality of the games. iOS has hundreds of thousands of games but they are widely categorized as shovelware, i.e low budget, mass volume to get the best ROI with the hope of having some random hit and a huge payoff.
High budget (AAA) tends to be the focus on the main gaming platforms. The most recent example would be Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild that took 4 years to make. Games like that aren't available on iOS. This is to do with how much the games cost to make vs how much the audience is willing to pay for it.
http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/06/zelda_breath_of_the_wild_needs_to_sell_2_million_copies_to_make_a_profit
http://nintendotoday.com/breath-of-the-wild-development/
This means the development budget was over $120m and the game will sell at $60. iOS games could never sell for $60 but they can sell in a higher volume. Mario Run made $53m. That's about 7.5m paid copies (assuming the revenue is 70% of $10) out of 78 million downloads. People still complained that $10 was a ripoff, which is crazy relative to the overall games industry.
There's a lot of risk involved in developing high production value content of any kind. If it's not popular then a single production can bankrupt a company. The safer route is to aim for lower volume, high price and target an audience that really wants the product. That's effectively what Apple does with hardware but it means there's a smaller audience for developers to target. With mobile hardware they have managed to hit a very good balance between price, unit volume and quality but the mobile audience pays less per user. 1 billion users, $28b revenue = $28 each per year.
I don't think the Mac platform is as bad as it could be for games. Linux is far worse despite having the benefit of cheaper hardware. There are a lot of good game ports for the Mac thanks to Feral and Aspyr who cherry-pick the better games to port. Given Apple's resources, I don't see the harm in them putting some effort behind that. Just commission ports of games to both Mac and iOS capped at maybe $5-10m per port and they recoup most of it with the app store fees.
When it comes to hardware, I don't see this as being an issue these days. The highest MBP can handle high-end games at 1080p:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-Pro-460.181783.0.html
The notebook version of the NVidia 1080 can handle pretty much any game at 4K:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1080-Laptop.171212.0.html
That's an 8TFLOP GPU. The top Mac Pro dual GPU from 3 years ago is 7TFLOP. The iMac tends to be 3x the MBP so maybe 5-6TFLOP but it could probably handle a 1080 notebook level GPU. Price is more important a consideration than the performance, the highest-end MBP and iMac are above $2k, which limits the audience for higher end graphics. This price point was mentioned in the video above too.
VR doesn't have a wide enough appeal for either Apple or Oculus to support it on the Mac. High performance GPUs are always useful but the next couple of generations of GPUs are going to be pretty much peak level for what people need when they can run high-end games at 4K at 60FPS.