That famous quote from the film, Field of Dreams, "if you build it, they will come" is a great movie quote. That quote in the movie inspires Kevin Costner's character in FOD to build a baseball field, and a bunch of deceased baseball players return from the dead to play a baseball game.
In the real world, Kevin Costner is replaced by Mark Zuckerberg, a baseball field is replaced by Facebook Horizons, and the dead baseball players are replaced with a dead customer base. At least in the movie FOD dead baseball players actually come back to play a baseball game. In the real world, the dead customer base is not playing any game in the metaverse.
What I mentioned is of course filled with metaphors and hyperbole. I have been active in the VR industry since 2014, and there has been significant change and growth in terms of technology, amount of games being developed, etc. Yet, the industry seems to not being growing at all in terms of sales, market, and userbase.
The top-selling VR game of all time, Beat Saber, has managed to sell over 4 million copies of the game. Which is very small considering conventional games like Elden Ring are able to earn more revenue in-game sales before launch.
Beat Saber was created by a team of just 3 people and was an instant success. Especially, when you compare it to VR products like Facebook Horizons or Resident Evil 4 VR that were made by 100s of people. Facebook Horizon's de-facto mission is to become the next internet and change the way we socialize. Resident Evil 4 VR is an immersive environment based off of a super-popular IP. With thousands of VR games, and billions of dollars invested in VR content, why would the most popular game be made by just a team of 3 people?
Beat Saber is just a swashbuckling rythym VR game. Maybe the fact that it is something simple and "just a" type game is why it is so popular. Beat Saber never was promising anything super big like disrupting the world of video games or offering anything "innovative" that reminds people of an episode of Black Mirror. It was a simple game that was easy to pickup, difficult to master, and gave people what they actually want. Not jamming a square peg into a roundhole trying to get people interested in innovation.