I have to disagree. They need to have a better product than their competitors if they ever want to be more than that cute little kick starter start up that found a niche and let someone cash in after their hard work. And we are starting to see that this is extending way past just the headset.
The technology industry and particularly anything to do with gaming is inherently competitive. If you think Oculus is just going to be able to walk down this "VR road" all carefree, minding their own business and that no one is going to bother them you got another thing coming. That's like thinking Nvidia was going to leave Sony/MS alone after their contracts fell off.
Everything that the sony setup does that's not present on the oculus will become a flaw and point in Sony's favor. Oculus seemingly has a majority of the industry at least considering flying their banners. They need to capitalize on
that and ship a complete product.
Again man, I think you're expecting too much from the outset. I never said they could be carefree on not worry about what anybody else is doing. But its not a heads on competition like PS4 vs Xbox. They each essential have exclusive reign over their particular platform. If one company does something neat, the other isn't necessarily gonna be hurt by that, and can look at it and implement it themselves if they feel it fits what they want to do. If anything, Oculus has the advantage there because they can iterate. Sony is the one who has deliver a complete product that will be expected to be compatible with every PS4 VR title in the future. If Oculus comes up with something really cool, depending on what it is, there might be far less room for Sony to implement it themselves if they've already shipped their headset.
Anyways, the PC world is different than the console world. On consoles, yes, consumers will want to know that everything they have will just work and that there will be finished games ready to play. PC, less so. There will still be some expectation of that, and there will certainly be *plenty* of titles and experiences that will be ready to play just like on console, but there's also lots of room for experimentation, glorified tech demos, games in beta, hacked support for existing games/experiences and whatnot.
Sony is obviously full of incredibly smart people and I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff from them. I'm excited about it. I'm sure Oculus are excited about it, too. Oculus are doing this because of a passion for VR, not because they think this is a good get-rich scheme. They've gladly taken in tons of constructive criticism all throughout their development and have welcomed input from others in terms of how things could be better. They will be looking at Sony with great interest, because they know they can feed off each other and push VR forward.
But like I said, controller support is plenty good enough for VR at the moment. Its what I think the large majority of VR games in the near future will be designed to be played with. So no, Oculus do not need to be worried about Sony or that they aren't shipping a complete product. They'll have one hell of a product when the consumer version does release, trust me. I'm not sure why you're so insistent on trying to downplay that.
I agree but I think there are limits to this as well. But I really think people need to quit bastardizing competition as if it's not something that has helped us consumers more than hurt.
What are the limits to that, specifically? Seriously, its not as much of a competition as you think it is. Maybe a healthy rivalry would be a better way to put it?