Missing the moment: Virtual reality’s breakout still elusive

“I believe that augmented and virtual reality are going to enable a deeper sense of presence and social connection than any existing platform, and they’re going to be an important part of how we’ll interact with computers in the future,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to keep investing heavily in building out the best experiences here, and this accounts for a major part of our overall R&D budget growth.”

“Quest 2 serves as a necessary step towards VR maturity,” said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. “It’s also an expected step in the sense that consumers and the market have been conditioned by smartphone trends to see very regular technology upgrades.”

Hardware updates are good, Nguyen said, but creating more content and ways to create content, and improving the gadgets’ usability, is needed for the tech to fully mature, he said.

Part of the original Quest’s success was the first-person shooter VR game “Half-Life: Alyx” which sold about 680,000 copies in its first month, according to Nielsen’s SuperData. That’s a hit for VR games, but still niche compared with games like Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which sold 13.41 million copies worldwide in its first six weeks.

Creating content for VR is “a heavy lift,” Nguyen said. “A lot of companies out there are creating platforms you can build stuff on. But the talent and content pipeline isn’t there yet.”