A recent interview between Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty and The Hollywood Reporter has revealed why Xbox is not planning on pursuing the VR space right now. It mostly has to do with the market size.
“I think for us, it’s just a bit of a wait until there’s an audience there,” he said, noting that the scale to enter the VR space for Xbox would need to be around 10 million. Matt says that it’s pretty much the only way that Xbox can succeed in the VR/AR space.
Xbox competitor Sony has been involved in virtual reality for quite some time, with its PlayStation VR2 releasing back in February. Back in March, Sony’s president Hiroki Totoki stated that he believed the VR2 had a “good chance” of beating its predecessor in sales. By the end of 2019, PlayStation’s first VR headset had sold over 19 million units.
Indeed, the VR2 has beaten the first headset in terms of its speed of sales. In its first six weeks since launch, the VR2 sold over 600,000 units.
No VR for Xbox Anytime Soon
However, it doesn’t look like Xbox wants a piece of the VR pie yet. In fact, back in 2019, Xbox head Phill Spencer basically said that VR is a niche and “isolating” format that he didn’t find fitting of his vision for gaming. For Phil Spencer, gaming is more about being something “communal.” He basically said that Xbox users don’t want VR.
His comments did receive some backlash and Phil Spencer later clarified that he loves how the games industry is expanding in new fields, but he reiterated that VR is not within Xbox’s focus. Still, in 2020, he hoped that VR would become “so important that it would be a no-brainer for us.”
In 2021, Spencer once again said that Xbox was not interested in VR.
Xbox previously had the Kinect system, which is the most comparable thing Xbox has done to these sorts of virtual and augmented reality spaces. The Kinect didn’t last very long and was eventually dropped from the whole Xbox brand. It seems like Xbox fans prefer a controller in hand and less virtual stuff.
It especially seems that way with Matt Booty’s comments about VR as well. Maybe one day Xbox will branch into the virtual reality space. For now, it seems pretty unlikely.
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Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
