Sorry Kelstar - this is going to turn into one of those hold my beer moments...
Noone has ever said VR was not niche, it is still niche, but rapidly gaining traction. More importantly, it has to be recognised that VR is not just a thing used by a couple of dozen players, it's a thing used by tens of thousands of players. It's not just a crazy contraption that a couple of dozen nerds soldered up in their back bedrooms, its a couple of billion dollars a year hardware industry + the software sales. Sony alone has sold over 5 million PSVR headsets, and they are superniche being locked into a console that can only just about run VR properly, and it needing pretty bespoke VR implementations of its titles, whereas PC based VR games benefit from pretty standardised, and rapidly improving interoperability of VR games and VR headsets. Compared to 100 million PS4's it is niche, but five million units is five million units, whether its 95% of a market or 5% of the market.
Take things across to PC, with half a dozen or more major manufacturers mass-producing headsets, and yeah, the number of VR players grows exponentially:
Taken from:
AR/VR headset shipments worldwide 2023 | Statista
In 2022, the number of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) devices shipped worldwide reached 9.11 million units, with forecasts suggesting that this is set to fall to 7.45 million units in 2023.
www.statista.com
As for discounting the work to put VR in elite - use forum search and look up my post in the list of results for All Hail Greg - VR in elite as we have it was put in by one dev in one day. One Dev, One Day, back in the day when VR was bleeding edge and there wasn't the plethora of examples / turtials / documented API's all a bit janky and "not user friendly". Fast forward 7 years, the internet is awash with examples / tutorials / documentation and polished API's to used, so much so that many games are benefiting from VR mods made by players of the game. Examples of which include Alien Isolation and GTA-VR, and some of those mods are opensourced and documented in github, as is the new all encompassing works with every headset open XR api.
Granted there have been a couple of tweaks to elite VR added along the way, like SRV maintain Horizon, option to remove one massive nausea trigger, and yes it's going to take a bit more work to make a polished VR on foot than on the pilots seat, but its not the monumental undertaking many of the opponents to it proclaim it would be. I'm genuinely sick of hearing about how adding VR would "add another years delay to the release date of Odyssey".
If one man for one day can start from scratch and basic only from the pilots seat VR implemented, and that code wasn't lost to the computers of atlantis, it still exists somewhere, as will the Maintain Horizon option for SRV VR, and this is still happening in the COBRA engine* I'm pretty sure a couple of devs put on VR in Odyssey for a week could produce something that would appease most VR players. Sure the resultant implementation might not get them the full fanfare that is heaped on dedicated VR games like Lone Echo, nor would it win them any VR awards in the games industry, but it would be very gratefully received by Elite VR players.
*even if Odyssey moved from the cobra engine to another bought in engine from another software house like say unreal or frostbite or whatever, I reckon you could find a VRmod for a game based on that engine or simply "port" / "migrate" one of the other open sourced games mods, or relatively easily make your own VR implementation using the examples available.
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