If you make a game that's designed around 360 tracking and utilizing your hands, you can port it to the Rift but only a small fraction of the users would have the necessary hardware and setup for it to work, and you fundamentally could not port it to the PSVR. Right now there are so few VR games that everybody is mostly making tech demos, and it's a bit of a crapshoot how well they work on each piece of hardware as a lot of stuff gets figured out. As more developers commit to the Vive (which polls show is the case) it seems likely that the full experience games won't be ported at all. I foresee a lot of forks within VR gaming, which is bad considering it's seeing much slower growth than many had hoped.
What I suspect will happen is the Vive will dominate for PC gaming (which I suspect will be a niche market), Oculus will dominate mobile (I think this will take 5-10 years and they will be heavily competing with Apple who is leapfrogging VR entirely for AR which I think will be a far bigger market and the true next computing platform), and the PSVR will slowly fade into oblivion the same way that nobody uses a Kinect anymore.
Would you be willing to clarify what your exact position on this is, so that I don't respond to the wrong statement and we end up talking past one another (because I think we're in agreement to an extent):
Is it untrue that PSVR games can be ported to other VR platforms (this is what I was responding to initially and asked for clarification on) or that there are legitimate technical and market hurdles involved in porting from PSVR to other VR platforms?
My initial comment was that it is true because that exact phenomenon is happening, there are multiple titles out that exist across all three major VR platforms and we're about to have more (Good lord almighty will Elite Dangerous hurry up and come out for PS4 already...); so my disagreement starts and about ends there because I thought that's what you were arguing?
Is that no longer the case as you're now talking about demos, and market split between Vive vs PC vs VR and the technical challenges needed to port games among platforms? If this is the case, I-in fact-agree with you.
Again, I just want to make sure I know exactly what I'm responding to.
As more developers commit to the Vive (which polls show is the case)
Would you mind sharing those polls? This is something I'm very interested in as the whole VR space right now has really got me wanting to get back into game development-which was a hobby in high school making 2D platformers-so I'm curious what about the Vive is so attractive to other developers.
More developers are interested in working with the Vive from polls - https://uploadvr.com/htc-vive-gdc-state-of-the-industry-2017... - and admittedly it's anecdotal but everyone I know is exclusively interested in the Vive (ignoring my friends that work at Facebook, but they're not game developers).
Yes, games made for PSVR can be ported to the Rift and Vive. However games designed for the Vive that take advantage of its capabilities probably cannot be ported to the other systems. Basically, the Vive can do more stuff, and if you design you game around that it doesn't port well (or potentially at all) to the other headsets.
What I suspect will happen is the Vive will dominate for PC gaming (which I suspect will be a niche market), Oculus will dominate mobile (I think this will take 5-10 years and they will be heavily competing with Apple who is leapfrogging VR entirely for AR which I think will be a far bigger market and the true next computing platform), and the PSVR will slowly fade into oblivion the same way that nobody uses a Kinect anymore.