Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

Unfortunately VR also showed the flipside of Valves approach to development - putting extreme amounts of money and effort into a project, then abruptly dropping it and moving on to something else. The Index was great at the time but now it's five years old, dated in numerous aspects, and hasn't even had a price cut since launch. Alyx is great but it came out four years ago and Valve has done nothing with VR games since, either themselves or by using their infinite bankroll to help fund third party PC VR development until it's more sustainable.

I've been patiently waiting for an index 2 or a price cut. I will continue to patiently wait.

I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.

For better or worse Facebook are the ones keeping VR on life support, without them it would have flatlined years ago. They have the only good affordable headsets, they throw tons of money around to bankroll VR game studios in exchange for exclusivity, and even for games they don't bankroll it's a no-brainer to prioritize their platform because >90% of sales happen there.

https://x.com/MuchRockness/status/1849543449906942094

Even the minority who do buy VR games on Steam are mostly playing them on a cheap Meta headset, so without Meta those sales might not have happened either. The most recent Steam hardware survey shows that of the users who have a VR headset, nearly two thirds of them are using an Oculus/Meta model.

VR continues to lack a Killer App to sustain the field (I say this as owner of 3 VR devices, including the Index)

Valve tried to make it with Alyx, and while it is amazing, it did not inspire the industry to follow up on.

I do not blame Valve for moving on when nobody followed them.

I think it's pretty obvious that Alyx didn't inspire the industry because it's a giga-budget game addressed to a tiny potential market, that Valve could only afford to make due to Steam being an infinite money printer. It wouldn't surprise me if Alyx never recouped its development costs despite the immense hype around it.

If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR market gained more momentum and became self-sustaining.

It's also a $60 purchase that requires a beefy Windows machine in addition to the headset.

VR is a small market to begin with, and most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.

Does Half Life Alyx not come with the headset anymore?

Even among people on Steam (who have those beefy Windows machines for VR), more than half of headsets are an Oculus, and only 17% are an Index:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I'm happy for them. I'd rather never touch VR again than plug my eyes into facebook.

There is a reason for that: Meta focused on VR with "infinite money", hiring almost the entire VR development team from Valve. Valve just could not compete. They could not spend 10 billion dollars like Meta did.

Creating a working nuclear fusion device could be cheaper than that.

> I'm happy for them.

It's a pyrrhic victory, they may have cornered the market but it's still losing them $4-5 billion every quarter with no end in sight.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/30/metas-reality-labs-posts-4po...

I have the Quest 3 and Arkham Shadow gives me all the same feels as Half Life Alyx. Before AS dropped I hadn't turned on my Q3 for over 6 months.

> most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.

When Alyx first came out I had a PC that was the minimum recommended specs for VR from the day the Vive launched (4790K and Geforce 970). The game ran fine.

It sure as hell got better when I upgraded to a 3900X and 3070, but it plays just fine on the original minimum requirements VR PC which was a $1500 PC in 2015.

The idea that PC VR requires a massive rig is just nonsense. Computers that run VR perfectly fine are literally being forced in to retirement, they're officially obsolete.

Have you tried "I expect you to die"? It's a really compelling VR game.

Yeah, I think it's a pretty nonsense arguement if you've tried running it on constrained hardware. I played Alyx on a 1050ti and it was pretty much flawless for 72hz gameplay. Anything weaker than that outright isn't going to run anything in VR very well.

Also worth noting - you don't need Windows to play Alyx either. SteamVR supports Linux perfectly well, and other games that don't ship native Linux-native builds can still run through Proton. If you own VR in any capacity whatsoever, you should be capable of playing Half Life Alyx; that was Valve's selling point for anyone that had Steam and a headset.

Valve moved a lot of Indexes because of it.

This is very interesting, I've wanted to play Alyx for a long time but could never justify the cost, assuming it needed a very expensive gaming pc. Maybe now I can afford it

Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs

I played on Legion Go. It's basically a Steam Deck with newer specs and native Windows support.

It ran, but barely. I probably spent half my playtime restarting the game, trying to find the happy coincidence of playability (because the other sessions were too rough). Being able to play Alyx was one of the reasons I chose the Go over the Deck.

> This is very interesting, I've wanted to play Alyx for a long time but could never justify the cost, assuming it needed a very expensive gaming pc. Maybe now I can afford it

Nope, no need for an expensive gaming PC, just an actual gaming PC.

As with cars, phones, etc. if your budget is tight you can always get so much more value by going for a used model from a generation or two back than you would get by spending the same money on something new.

> Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs

Steam Deck can technically run a few VR titles but it doesn't do it well. There is a lot of evidence that Valve has prototype standalone headsets running on Steam Deck derived hardware platforms (often referred to as "Deckard") but the hardware just isn't there for full quality PC VR.