The Super Smash Bros. series (and Smash 64) is 20 years old now.

No one is playing those for hours on end. Player retention is a huge factor, and between nausea that most people get after an hour or two of VR, and physical exercise, you can’t market games that make money for a VR platform. You’re using games with a physical factor as examples, but none are VR and all are novelty games - no one is playing them for hours on end.

When you’re developing a game for a specific platform you have to look at how long people are going to play it every day, which has a direct correlation with how much money they’re willing to spend on microtransactions. On top of my previous points, viability of revenue is a massive factor, and VR just isn’t a market that’s large enough to sustain a live-service AAA release.

And once again, is anyone going home after work or school and playing the games you mentioned for more than 3 hours? The answer is no - those games, outside of Pokémon Go, were party games meant for rotational play or small slices of fun. Even for single-player games, it’s hard to immerse yourself in a world that makes you nauseous or tired after just a few hours of playing.

Games nowadays are built with player retention in mind - VR just isn’t capable of sustaining the kinds of numbers that publishers are looking for when determining if a game will be profitable or not - so on top of the fact that people don’t want to play VR in the mainstream due to cost, physical stress, nausea, and other minor factors, the market just isn’t there either.

/r/smashbros Thread Parent