VR Gaming Has Not Caught ON Yet?

I maintain that the biggest reason is the limited selection of software capable of competing with conventional games, coupled with a general lack of public awareness of the software that is out there.

Speaking as someone who was a very early adopter (I've got an eMagin 3D Visor sitting in my closet) the industry was kind of blindsided by just how different VR gaming would actually be. If you look at some of the earliest work being done to support VR by major studios, they were mostly operating on the assumption that the HMD really would just be a display with advanced head tracking. Players in VR would be using the same control scheme as everyone else, and giving a title VR support was as simple as adding a few additional libraries into the code and a switch to activate the stereoscopic rendering support that had already been built into DirectX. And most of their preparations for VR's launch were based on those assumptions, with this level of VR support being built into first-person games like Alien: Isolation with the plan being that they'd be the big AAA launch titles for the systems when they finally released.

Then, as it always does, things changed as we learned more about how VR worked in the real world. People started to realize that the motion sickness problem couldn't be solved entirely by better hardware, and required devs to actually design around it. Extreme rendering requirements introduced equally extreme requirements for optimization. And then room-scale became a thing and completely turned everyone's assumptions about how you'd interact with a game on its head.

This created two major problems for VR developers. First, VR support had just shifted from something that could be done in an afternoon to something that required a completely separate development pipeline. And second, we had basically just thrown out the book on how to build an interface and returned to the days when Pong was cutting edge.

Now, to be fair, there are quite a lot of people who love Pong and would still choose to play it over Cyberpunk 2077. But they're not exactly in the majority.

The good news is that we're making substantial progress on both of these issues, largely thanks to the willingness of everyone currently working in VR to share what they've learned and even actual code with one another to try and bootstrap VR development up to something approaching the level of something like the 16-bit era of gaming. But we've still got a ways to go before it's possible to create something as complex as an Assassin's Creed or a Tomb Raider without the gameplay feeling forced.

And if you're a major development studio, it just doesn't make a ton of sense to invest heavily in VR development when 2D games are a much safer bet. This means that the majority of development is being carried out by smaller independent studios, which frankly seems to suit the bigger ones just fine. They can simply wait until one produces a title with the desired level of technical sophistication and then buy them out and have an instant VR team.

Of course, for the general market, this can be a bit frustrating. Indie studios tend to operate on razor-thin margins, and most of these games aren't getting publication deals that come with outside money for a marketing campaign. Not only that, but the games themselves tend to be shorter or released in an incomplete state, as befits their quasi-experimental status. So if you're a consumer who isn't excited enough to keep up with this yourself, most development might as well not exist.

You're not seeing flashy ads on TV for a blockbuster game available only for the HTC Vive, but you are seeing them for the latest iteration of Call of Duty for the PlayStation 4. So, if you've got money to buy a console or a VR headset, why wouldn't you buy the one with all the big, awesome-looking games you want to play on it?