John Carmack, former CTO of Oculus and legendary programmer, isn’t shy when it comes to voicing his opinions on all things XR. To Carmack, Meta’s block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber (2018) was “far more important than Half-Life: Alyx” in pushing adoption of the medium.
While Valve’s PC VR game Half-Life: Alyx (2020) is largely prized as the pinnacle of ‘AAA’ VR gaming, Carmack maintains Beat Saber was “far more important,” owing to the hit rhythm game’s release on the original Quest in 2019.
“Whenever I post something critical of Meta’s handling of VR, there are always some old timers that pile on with “Yeah! More AAA PC VR Games is the way to win!”, Carmack says in a recent X post. “To be clear — standalone VR was the biggest win that VR ever had, by a huge margin, and Beat Saber was far more important than Half-Life Alyx.”
To Carmack, creating ‘AAA’ games exclusively for PC VR headsets simply isn’t a worthwhile pursuit for studios looking for a return on investment:
“Using a PC to drive VR experiences is a boutique niche. Still valuable and definitely worth supporting as a bonus feature, but not something that was going to turn into even console level success, let alone mobile level,” Carmack says.
It’s difficult to argue with Carmack on that point. To date, Beat Saber has generated 10 million unit sales on Quest alone, which doesn’t take into account the mountain of paid DLC music packs Meta has released over the years, including packs from Metallica, Britney Spears, Daft Punk, 2Pac, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Dr Dre and more.
While Valve has never released specific download numbers, according to estimates aggregated by SteamDB, Half-Life: Alyx has between 2.2 million and 4.4 million owners at the time of this writing.
That’s not to say ‘AAA’ PC games can’t create what Carmack calls “VR bonus features” though, which would ostensibly entail sidelining VR support as an optional mode while developing for traditional monitors:
“The economics of AAA development were never going to be widely brought to bear on a PC accessory. I do think there is opportunity for AAA content to profitably have “VR bonus features”, but not fully designed-for-VR projects at comparable levels of effort.”
