Did they make money? obviously not.

Will it help them make money in the future? nobody knows. Probably not as much as it could have, we’ll have to wait and see.

for game development apparently godot has a standalone version for Meta headsets, but it doesn’t really work on the Vision Pro other than some community version that only allows it to display 3d models in small bounds because of OS restrictions, theoretically it should work immersively with WebXR but I don’t really know (and then you have to limit your game to what can feasibly be downloaded in a few seconds)

Youtube discontinued their thing for SteamVR, and yet people still use SteamVR.

I think according to basically everyone even something like Pokemon Go counts as AR, but I get your point.

this does raise a good question, if apple intended this as specifically being for developers, why aren’t they marketing it as such and encouraging devs that they will release a cheaper headset later?

there have always been a subset of vr headsets where the displays and optics are good but are otherwise flawed, that have been relegated to the flight sim and sim racing world lol

(I have a reverb g2 and use it for ‘normal’ vr games, but I understand its most popular among sim people, I think Pimax headsets generally see similar use)

(also apple has told no one about ALVR and other streaming, the basically only people who will know about it are the people who liked and were using VR already and probably already have a headset they are generally satisfied with, so I doubt it has significantly affected their sales, they still shot themselves in the foot by pretending that Fruit Ninja or whatever was the only game that people would want to play with their headset)

theoretically with webxr and webgpu you should be able to do just about anything on the web that you can do in an app, although I guess its more effort since you basically have to make the game engine yourself

there is a big difference between those 3d effects and actual vr, where with one you only get the primitive depth idea your brain produces versus actually being able to inspect something from any angle

it also enables very different inputs, like with beat saber or rumble for example, or recently I was imagining a game where you can point at something to grapple on to it while using the other controller to shoot at enemies at the same time which wouldn’t really work without vr

unfortunately for me i’m someone who is interested in computer graphics and the difference in immersion from vr is largely offset by the graphics being worse, the screens looking worse and blurrier, the lack of an actual focus depth (I forget what the technical term for this is but most headsets have everything set so your eyes always focus at what would normally by 1-2 meters away), and the new perspective exposing all of the little graphics tricks that don’t really work when you can see them in this level of detail

(i’d say an ideal headset would probably have 6x more pixels than my reverb g2 (/3.5 px because it would also have foveated rendering) and be able to render visuals similar to cyberpunk at ‘rt ultra’, with apparently already gets 90 fps on a 4090 at 1080p, so that would be 7.5x more pixels, you would need a card 7.5x faster than a 4090, so assuming Moore’s Law stays accurate that should be around 12 years from now)

so why hasn’t vr taken off? I would say (in no particular order) it’s because it hurts your eyes, makes you dizzy, is uncomfortable, its expensive, it doesn’t have many apps, the controls feel janky for actual ui stuff where a mouse and keyboard is just easier, people are lazy and it requires some physical activity, people don’t have all that much free time

don’t take this the wrong way, I generally love VR and have probably 150-200 hrs in it over two years (a lot less than a some people, if you look at the reviews for vr chat for example its not uncommon for people to have >5k hours)

apple is worth trillions of dollars, a few million is nothing to them