My guess its because unless you’re Meta with the Quest VR is incredibly niche and looks like its going to remain so, certainly in the short term.
The problems that myself and others have with flight sim and VR, namely its a total faff and works very inconsistently, is common in other games/sims too. It would help a lot if was just plug in and play, but its far from being that, and thats whats putting a lot of people off it.
I’m sure Apple will make using their headset a relatively seamless experience but that will be a niche product for them too. I get them impression they’re only making a headset at all because there’s pressure on them to release a new bit of hardware. If I was a betting man I’d put money on them cancelling their headset after a couple of years of very low sales.
So at the end of the day I think MS probably feel they want others to worry about making VR work. In the long run the Quest headset may be the default headset the vast majority of flight simmers end up using. MS will feel they can’t compete with it so they may just support it in what ever way they can with the sim.
Actually, for me it really has become pretty much plug & play:
“Fire up VD… Fire up Q3…Load MSFS… Fly”
80% of the time spent in this sequence is waiting for MSFS to load.
To me that’s the big one to watch. Apple has a proven track record of making new tech reach profitability. If they succeed, others will follow suit. If they fail, it may paralyze the AR market for years.
MS was never after the consumer HMD market. They pursued the commercial AR market with HoloLens and that’s what WMR was developed for. HoloLens has apparently failed so it’s being abandoned and with it WMR. None of this has anything directly to do with the consumer VR market.
WMR has nothing in common with VR support in MSFS. WMR is just a set of drivers for a family of headsets with HP Reverb G2 being most known for simming. There are other headsets not dependent on WMR, to name a few: Varjo, Pimax, Quest etc.
Watching from the sidelines as a brief G2 owner that hopes to one day return to VR. Flight Simulator was developed in partnership with HP and their G2 headset, and of course Microsoft’s WMR. With those being discontinued, is it possible that Asobo will have little incentive (or pressure from Microsoft) to further develop VR into FS24 beyond basic legacy support? Who else in the VR industry might make a good partnership?
That’s the $30,000 question.
My vote right now goes to the only apparent VR industry mover, Meta. I hope they and MS can work together, or at least in parallel.
Alternatively, Apple. I have less hope of this, though, given their historic rivalry.
I don’t think MSFS 2024 will be so much different from MSFS 2020 (which is BTW still using some FSX code). MS simply needs new product to sell some more licences.
If the VR support is available in MSFS 2020 I don’t think they will remove it from MSFS 2024. They are not implementing any improvements to VR support (so they don’t need any development partner), but I don’t think they will throw VR support to trash.
Source? Or do you just mean this is the current trend? I too would expect VR to carry over to FS24. However, with them making substantial changes to the graphic engine, these may be breaking changes. My worry is that VR will receive a minimal port over to the new version, basic legacy support, rather than a robust overhaul to take advantage of new optimization techniques and hardware features.
Apple and Meta sure would be strange bedfellows for a Microsoft gaming title, but that would definitely be interesting to see.
I seriously doubt MS/Asobo are gonna rip the VR out of MSFS2024 just because WMR is on death row. Not like we were expecting anything innovative (hand tracking, foveated rendering etc etc) over the years from WMR anyway. There are OTHER VR companies who are still trying to push the envelope and we still have SteamVR, OpenVR, OpenXR functionality. It isn’t like MSFS’s VR feature is a WMR exclusive, and thank goodness for that!
“And, yes, for those that were freaking out because perhaps VR was going to be removed, VR is part of the package. I really see no reason for that not to happen – but then again, I also didn’t see why airliners would be removed – yet folks seem to be going nuts over it and I hope this helps them settle down and relax.”
“Nobody is sorting out PC based VR” was my response to this comment:
Nobody is sorting out PC based VR because nobody is sorting out PC based VR. That’s just a statement of fact, it will remain an expensive, time consuming niche hobby for a subset of simmers and enthusiasts.
I think I’m probably repeating myself for the third time, I don’t see why this is even controversial.
Somehow a few of you seem to think that the axing of WMR support is the reason that nobody is going to be ‘sorting out PC based VR’. Didn’t say that and don’t believe that for a second.
WMR being axed however is not nothing, and as I think I already said but I’ll say again - for those with reading and comprehension difficulties - is indicative of the PC VR market, but not necessarily the cause of it’s decline.
There are much more interesting discussions to be had around the state of PCVR, but if half of you cannot even agree on a few clear facts of where it is right now, and the other half can’t follow a basic thread of discussion then maybe we’ll all be better just going off and watching our favourite youtubers and keep forking out thousands of dollars on brand new hardware, and we can all meet up back here in a couple of years when we wonder why all of a sudden the VR support in this 5/8/10 year old sim suddenly doesn’t work any more
Let’s have a GOOD look at the percentage of users that have a system that, as of today, can use VR - any headset - in a way that makes it worth using. We are around 9% (looking at video card ONLY, 3080 and above).
Now let’s look at the percentage of Steam users with VR headsets - it’s 1,89%.
It’s low? Maybe. But you must compare it against the users that can run VR, not against the whole lot. And this gives us a nice 21%.
I use VR from DK1 day one. The problem has always been double-sided: quality of experience, hardware power.
Now, only now, we’re getting there. After all this hype (based on nothing), now we’ll have some real stuff happening in silence.
I won’t go as far as saying this is a “statement of fact”, but I consider this highly probable.
It’s pointless using steam survey results to gauge VR numbers, there’s far too many variables. It would be far more prudent to gauge VR users based on games/Sims that support VR, not the entire steam user base of games.
Secondly I fear, like others, that because Microsoft have dropped WMR/VR then the higher management may put pressure on MSFS to ignore future development of this area. They’ve already merged the VR team into the core Dev team long ago, they already have a massive backlog of issues & bugs that are long past due dates to be fixed, not forgetting they initially ignored VR users at the very beginning until we screamed from the roof tops to demand VR inclusion.
I can honestly see a half baked attempt to further continue VR support, enough to keep users happy that it works, but not enough to warrant expansive new feature sets and important bug fixes - which is what we’ve had all along anyway.
It’s a shame we’re treated like a minority, when the truth is there’s thousands of VR users in this Sim not to mention millions of users overall. A better understanding and acceptance from Jorg and his management team would go a long way, so let’s see what happens, my fingers are crossed but my expectations & faith with MS are rock bottom.
They seriously don’t care about VR. I have to exit VR after each flight before starting a new one otherwise I will never see the “Ready to Fly” button on the next flight. Sometimes I end up with no Main Menu either.. just looking at a plane in the hanger and no way to continue anything. Only happens if I forget to Exit VR between flights.
They have so many ongoing issues that VR is at the bottom of the priority list. I understand not adding features (although they did add VR controller support which I actually thought was a complete waste of time.. and thats as a VR sim enthusiast). Whats worse is they break things for VR and never fix them.
I remember one Q&A where there were VR questions and Jorg said he had news about VR for next Q&A.. Well, nothing happened in the next Q&A and no mentions since.
Is VR really going to be included for FS2024? Maybe that also will change before release. Time will tell I guess.
If you are certain enough that the support will be there in this, or any other title you currently play in VR in a couple of years down the road, to justify a spend of a couple of grand on a PCVR headset then by all means go for it.
VR was broken for the best part of a year by a windows 11 update, of all things, a year
Have at it! There are a ton of headsets to choose from, I hear Pimax have even sorted out their cardboard boxes. Seriously, don’t listen to me, if you feel you will get your money’s worth you should totally go all in.
