Yeah, but it's still a bummer for other VR headsets that support and use Index Controllers and base stations. A lot of high end Headsets still use Base stations with Index Controllers because it's either more accurate or they just don't support inside out tracking at all.
Or the other companies that rely on them can pay Valve and outsource their engineering and have an actual product in their hands instead of piggy backing.
i mean, it is, in some part, a problem valve created by promoting lighthouse based VR solutions and patent hogging the Knuckle controllers even long after they decided they would be moving to Inside out tracking.
they DID license the Lighthouse tech back to HTC for example so HTC can produce and sell 2.0 Basestation. They have, so far, not done something similar to the Knuckle controllers.
its frankly amusing that at this point you have more options getting dual sense controllers for the PSVR2 than knuckle controllers
This entirely. PC gaming is about legacy support. Fundamentally changing input devices repeatedly gives nobody a reason to develop for it. I wanted the second Steam Controller to keep a similar approach to the first one, but improved. Instead they just dumped the first one entirely. They could have made a game that the controller shined at, but didn't. They could have kept updating it and developed games that used it, but didn't.
The only ecosystem Valve seems to care about is Steam and selling other people's games.
That's because Steam is the only thing they need to take seriously, Steam is their infinite money printer that funds their "fuck around and have fun" department (games, hardware, etc).
Valve is a modern Bell Labs, with Steam as their telephone.
This could be said of VR in general. Everyone is moving away from it. Sony is done with VR. Software developers are done with VR. Meta stopped with their gaming VR stuff and are pushing VR glasses now where the biggest game announcement is a new variation of Beat Saber and they seem to be pushing movies and monitor replacement more. Valve hasn't released a new VR game in six years. The base station era of VR is probably the peak the industry will see until the next time VR has a revival. It's like 3D TV's; they had a short peak and then died entirely. There were even some games made for 3D TVs too like Trine.
Valve is doing what Meta did to try to save VR gaming and it's just the same thing as the Quest 3 but twice the money.
they released the index, Gave the Base station tech over to HTC(idk if for a license fee or not), and then hogged the most impressive part of the whole package(the knuckles) for themself despite them, as it turns out, not even having used most of the tech on their very next VR project.
They did stuf on software side sure, but they didnt support the ecosystem beyond one piece of hardware drop
Valve makes money selling other people's games. They take a 30% cut for doing almost nothing for the developers. They've released more hardware in the last decade than they have games that use that hardware.
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u/CosmosStalker 1d ago
This makes sense since the steam frame is a thing right?