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Why Steam VR?

xavier4or
Explorer
Newbie question here - I see several discussion wrt Steam VR games - but trying to figure out what are the advantages?  Are there unique VR games available via Steam that you can't get via Oculus store?

I checked a few of the popular ones and they seemed to be listed both in Oculus store and Steam.

Thanks!
59 REPLIES 59

BadDanME
Expert Protege

Zenbane said:


Newcomers to the forum likely don't get the context that comments like that of CrashFu speak from. Don't take it personal. After 13 months of Steam users coming here to say, "Oculus Home sucks, and your little dog too," the dialogue tends to involve a sharp tone.


Ok, this may explain a lot. I myself am just a member of the VR-family since April this year, so maybe a lack of background information led to my (kind of) overreaction. 

But to pick up the mentioned small community over all VR ecosystems. That is one more reason to buy from different sources, that offer VR content. To show them, we appreciate that content. 

I´m sure, if I had a PS4, I would also buy a PSVR and buy stuff from the PSN, too.

Anonymous
Not applicable
I'm quite happy to buy some games on Steam but if I have a choice, even if it's more expensive, I'll always opt for the Oculus Store over Steam.

Why? Because Valve have been doing FUCK ALL with the money I've been giving them all these years. Left 4 Dead is dead (lol) and has been for donkey's years, no Half Life 2 VR available on launch day, no Half Life 3. Whilst The Lab is an excellent introduction to VR it's just a collection of mini-games.

Vive owners didn't give a fuck about the principle of the 'walled garden', they had the raging hump because you could have counted the top quality launch day titles on one hand. They had hardly any decent games to play compared to the riches that Rift owners had available.

Yes, Valve are now bringing 3 games to Steam for VR but knowing Valve Time we probably won't see them released until 2029 lol

It's too little too late as far as I'm concerned. Valve have been swimming around in Scrooge McDuck amounts of money since the very first Half Life game released in 98. In their early days they actually used this money to create more games, and great ones at that, but since Steam REALLY took off they've become a bunch of lazy bastards.

Not enough quality games when the Vive and Rift launched, no investment into indie developers, no Half Life 2 VR, no Half Life 3. Valve can suck my fucking cock. Wankers.

cleanupdisc
Adventurer
Fallout 4 vr will be the only reason i download from the steam store haha

CrashFu
Consultant
Debate rages over li'l old me.  I'm just sitting in the corner like  :blush:

So, to be fair, I literally have not bothered looking at what is on SteamVR since like six months after they launched the Vive.  And not just because, for ethical reasons, I would not ever buy from them even if they had a permanently-exclusive VR-game-of-the-year,  but also because I just don't feel like sifting through the landfill of uncurated bad games to try and find the good stuff.

As Snowdog has said, this has been a problem for years.  Up until fairly recently, I was a  steam-addict, I was always excited for the sales and I've got hundreds of games in my library there and hundreds of hours in many of those games.  But even before I started hating Valve as a company, I was already growing incredibly frustrated with their lack of curation, the massive decline in the average content coming to the store, and the absurd amount of clutter.

Not only does the 'landfill' situation make Steam incredibly user-unfriendly, basically guaranteeing you will NEVER find anything good unless you've seen it advertised outside of Steam or recommended to you specifically by a friend, but Steam is also an incredibly toxic environment for honest developers trying to sell their content;   Imagine you started a soda company, and you got your cola onto store shelves next to the Pepsi and Coke.  You wouldn't get a lot of notice, but occasionally someone would get curious and want to try something new, right? .... Now imagine there were literally one million separate brands of cola on that same shelf, with a hundred new brands being added every week.  Think you'd make a sale then?

Developers end up having to make massive price cuts or run huge sales to get anyone to buy their games at all on Steam.  And then other developers have to do the same to catch up.  The end result: content that some of them spent YEARS and a phenomenal amount of money to create are now being sold at the price of a ****ing sandwich (with Valve taking 30% off that) while developers on other platforms (especially console) can get five times that for their work.

And no matter how far games are devalued over there, Valve wins, because 30% of one $30 game and 30% of six $5-games is exactly the same amount of profit for them, while they build up a loyal fanbase of bargain-hunters who would rather horde cheap games (and then never actually play most of them) than to actually give deserving game-devs a fair price for their product.  And if any of those cheap games you buy are garbage and you ask for a refund?  Valve keeps your money and you get Steam Credits, meaning they just pay a small pittance to whatever developer whose content you spend those on.

Plus, at some point, you'd think developers would realize... if consumers HAVE to see my game advertised outside of steam or specifically recommended to them by friends before they will actively search them out on Steam.. if I have to generate a loyal-fanbase for my game before it even releases for it to have any chance of succeeding on Steam... then why the hell am I paying Valve 30%?  Just for server-hosting space?   Because if your game is famous enough that people will actively search for it by name, I guarantee they'll buy it from your website.

Anyways, I could literally spend hours ranting about how Steam has been strangling the PC gaming industry to death for years, but getting back on topic:

"If it's worth playing then it's either already on Oculus Home or soon will be" may sound arrogant to you (and that is, in fact, my trademark)  but that opinion is based on what's already happened, not just blindly supporting Oculus.  Example:  Raw Data and Job Simulator.  For the longest time these were the only SteamVR Exclusives anyone could name when asked "what is good on SteamVR?"  both ended up getting Oculus Home releases.  And many other interesting titles like Subnautica and Gunheart have been cross-platform from the start.  Plus, former-PSVR-exclusives like Batman Arkham VR keep showing up here.

Developers understand that Oculus are the ones injecting all of the money into this industry, and giving by far the most support to developers. They understand that Oculus is attracting people to their platform with killer, AAA VR apps coming out every month. They understand that more of Oculus' consumer-base are willing to pay a fair price for games, whereas Steam has intentionally groomed its customers to violently reject any price-tag above bargain-bin level.  They also understand that Valve, despite having nothing better to do than count their money these days, have been worryingly un-involved in the industry and made absolutely no effort to keep the VR portion of their business afloat, while their relationship with HTC becomes more strained by the day.

So any good game that's currently on SteamVR will, almost certainly, make it over here sooner or later, if its developers actually want to sell it.

Anyways, feel free to resume debating the topic of me; I do find it incredibly flattering. :kissing_heart:

It's hard being the voice of reason when you're surrounded by unreasonable people.

edmg
Trustee
Yes. The big problem I have with Steam is not that there are no good VR games there, but that they're very hard to find among the swamp of shovelware.

The other problem is that SteamVR is a horrible mess on the Rift.

BeastyBaiter
Superstar
No one is going to argue against that edmg. Sifting through all 70 pages of trash (for VR exclusives, nevermind VR supported) to find 5-6 things that might actually be worth playing is more than a little tedious. But the stuff is there, if you are willing to put up with the search. It doesn't help that their tags don't work properly either. Searching for "first person shooter" is a great way to get a bunch of job simulator and solitaire VR type results while simultaneously removing every FPS ever made. 😐

BadDanME
Expert Protege
@CrashFu @edmg Nothing to disagree on that. And now that I know there is some kind of "history" with this debate, I can see your answer in another context. 

I just wanted to say to the new and interested users (as if I were a veteran on this *lol* ), that Steam VR also has some gems to offer. They are just buried under a ton of garbage. 

madamluck
Heroic Explorer
When I was deciding what vr to get my husband told me that steam offers games and before I decided on buying a rift I gave steam a quick look through and was floored at the amount of games available. It wasn't until I actually got my rift and went looking for games to download that I found most to be of no interest to me. I spent days looking through them all ( after awhile of searching it got boring and had to take breaks ) I did find a few mixed in but in the end I only found maybe a handful of games that interested me. Now I rarely purchase from steam. I do prefer the OH for my game purchases but hate their refund policy. If I find a game that I know isn't an exclusive to OH I will check to see if it's on steam first for a lower price. that's pretty much how my spending on steam works now.

Anonymous
Not applicable
And Oculus have offered a trial period type thing for games on their Store for developers that want to take advantage of it. You can download a game for free and after a certain time you are given the choice of buying it or not. Saw that on Redit earlier, details here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/6t2mur/oculus_store_now_supports_free_trials_free_to/

Defense Grid 2 is the first game to offer this feature.

And we'll probably see the refund system that we in the UK have had for a while coming to other regions too I expect.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
I can certainly admit that Steam does offer way more services to the consumer:
  1. Free trials
  2. Demo's
  3. Refunds
  4. Gifting software
  5. Gifting credits
  6. Community Workshop
  7. Discussion boards
  8. Direct messaging

OH has a long way to go before it can boast of being end-user friendly when compared to Steam.

Most of those features, though, just don't appeal to me on a personal level, for the following reasons:
  1. Oculus has given me over 10 complete games entirely free; so a free trial feels like overkill. Especially because I still haven't beaten all the games in my Library (I have a Completionist gaming mentality).
  2. I don't care for demo's, I rely on "Let's Play" videos and community reviews. It's all about time management. I can read a review or watch a gameplay video while working. Relying on a demo eats in to my gameplay time at home, which I prefer to reserve for completing titles I already own.
  3. I make purchases with a fair degree of confidence. Out of some 50 VR titles total, I have maybe 3 that I regret. All low cost, and I knew I was gambling going in to them. Refunds aren't an issue in my case.
  4. Gifting Software and Credits needs to be remedied. For those that were here a few months back when I held the Dead & Buried tournament, I gifted Steam Credits to the winner. This was my only option cause Oculus is being lazy. Fix this, nubs 😛
  5. Community interaction in OH is needed, but I have a strong feeling that Oculus is waiting for Facebook Spaces to take over.

At the end of the day it comes down to the quality of the VR software offerings. Facebook and Oculus had the edge with Oculus Studios, who gave us all VR experiences that felt highly professional and as close to AAA as possible for an emerging industry. Remember that AAA games typically take 3-5 years of development time, and we just now completed the first year of commercial VR (CV1) for both the Vive and Rift. PlayStation-VR hasn't hit a full year on its own yet.

By Christmas 2018, both Steam and OH will likely share many AAA experiences. So the feelings of "rivalry" should begin to diminish by then.