We finally got our hands on Iron Man VR last week, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer got to see the game even earlier.
Over the weekend Spencer took to Twitter to reveal that developer Camouflaj had brought Spencer to its studio on numerous occasions to play the game over the course of development. It’s notable given that Iron Man VR is a PSVR exclusive published by Xbox rival, PlayStation itself.
I was lucky to have @ryanpayton sneak me in a couple of times to see the team at @Camouflaj and play builds during the development. Really proud of a local studio launching an impressive game. Well done Camouflaj. https://t.co/hIngnWR9s3
In his tweet, Spencer noted that he was “Really proud of a local studio launching an impressive game.”
Now, before we all read too much into Spencer’s not-so-secretive trips and what they might mean for Xbox VR, it’s important to remember Camouflaj was founded by Ryan Payton who worked on Halo 4 before its release in 2012. It’s very likely these trips were based on that friendship rather than Spencer’s desire to research VR on Xbox.
Spencer was also lucky enough to see Half-Life: Alyx ahead of release but even after that experience insisted that VR was not a focus for its next-generation consoles, headlined by Xbox One Series X. In February, he confirmed Series X would not support VR at launch.
Still, we can but keep holding out hope. Last month Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook after ditching Mixer game streaming, which might lay the foundation for VR support to come.
At least we can agree with Spencer that Iron Man VR is indeed an impressive game. We gave the experience 4/5 in our review, praising the game’s controls and story, even if some technical hiccups hold it back from becoming a true must-play.
Earlier this week Microsoft revealed they were ending the Mixer streaming platform and partnering with Facebook Gaming instead. Could this potentially mean big things for Xbox VR support finally via a relationship with Facebook-owned Oculus?
[Editor’s Note]: This was originally published on June 27, 2020 and is being republished on July 23, 2020 after the Xbox Series X Showcase.
In order to understand the significance of what this could mean for Xbox and for VR as a whole, it’s important to first look back and understand the past four years of broken promises and misleading marketing.
Microsoft’s Frustrating History With Xbox VR
During the E3 2016 Xbox press conference, Phil Spencer was on stage to reveal Project Scorpio, which later went on to be known as the Xbox One X. In that speech, he explicitly stated the console would provide, “true 4K gaming and high-fidelity VR. True 4K visuals without sacrificing quality; premiere VR experiences without sacrificing performance.”
Needless to say the VR promises never materialized. The slogan “hi-fidelity VR” was plastered all over the Project Scorpio website — at least, until it suddenly vanished — and since then Spencer has not stopped backpedaling.
In November of 2019 Spencer went on record as saying that VR is too isolating and that “nobody’s asking for VR” out of their consumer base. Sony’s own Shuhei Yoshida responded on Twitter in a rather coy manner, saying:
（´-`）.｡oO（we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for them）
Meanwhile, in other areas of Microsoft, the Windows Mixed Reality VR platform is continuing along and the HoloLens is already on its second iteration — now shipping to anyone that wants to buy one for a few grand.
The Windows VR headsets aren’t top of the line by any means in general, but they certainly get the job done as affordable entry points into a growing ecosystem with blockbuster titles like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and Half-Life: Alyx (to name just two from this year so far) seemingly proving the opposite of Spencer’s argument. On top of all that you’ve got the Oculus Quest, a breakout success for standalone wireless VR, and the PSVR, Sony’s flagship immersive headset that sits as the market leader with millions of headsets sold and a stellar lineup of platform exclusives.
If “nobody’s asking for VR” as Spencer says, who is buying all of these VR headsets and VR games?
Microsoft’s Partnership With Facebook Gaming
Earlier this week Microsoft announced the decision to shut down its livestreaming platform, Mixer. The service was positioned as a direct competitor to Twitch featuring livestreaming channels and internet personalities playing a wide variety of video games. Big name streamers, like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins even signed multi-million dollar exclusivity deals with Microsoft to stream on Mixer, leaving Twitch behind, very recently. That all seems to have been a waste of money.
Along with the Mixer news came the news that Microsoft will instead partner with Facebook Gaming, a hybrid brand from Facebook that encompasses not only livestreaming and traditional video games, but also mobile-focused casual games you can play within Facebook Messenger with friends or in the mobile app. Microsoft plans to use this partnership to replace the absence of Mixer and to bolster Project xCloud, its cloud-based game streaming service that is positioned in opposition to Google Stadia and PS Now.
The implications this partnership could have for cloud gaming are quite large — two of the largest tech companies on the planet have entered into a partnership, which is quite surprising. But it’s far more exciting to think about what it could mean for Xbox VR.
Why Now Is The Time To Finally Keep The Xbox VR Promise
If you owned an Oculus Rift back when it first launched in 2016, you might remember that Oculus Touch wasn’t out yet. That’s right: the original Rift launched without any motion controllers. The only tracked thing in that box was the headset itself using a single camera.
Instead, right alongside the headset and single camera, your box included an actual, official Xbox One controller.
It seems weird now because that relationship never flourished further, but the groundwork seems to have at least partially been laid half a decade ago for Xbox VR to happen.
Now with the Xbox Series X on the horizon, it seems like the perfect time to rekindle that relationship. By aligning with Facebook Gaming for streaming and cloud gaming, the door is now open to foster a partnership between Oculus and Microsoft to get Oculus headsets working with Xbox.
Microsoft hasn’t added support for their own VR headsets, but since the Xbox Series X is extremely capable out of the box, adding support for the Rift S or Quest — two headsets that are tracked via inside-out sensors built into the headset — seems like an excellent middle ground.
I reached out to both Xbox PR and Oculus PR to ask for comment on this concept, but didn’t receive anything useful. They’re staying tight-lipped if that’s the play.
Now is the time. Xbox has a stable of studios in their pocket right now, some of which have VR experience already like Ninja Theory and inXile, that could knock it out of the park with the power of an Xbox VR platform.
Innovating in the gaming space comes down to taking risks and backing bold ideas, not playing it safe. I’m fairly certain no one was “asking for” Xbox Live prior to the original Xbox, but Microsoft changed gaming forever anyway.
You need to read the room to gauge the direction the industry is slowly shifting. Perhaps the issue at hand here isn’t that nobody’s asking for VR, but that nobody’s listening.
What do you think about Xbox and its position with VR? Will Microsoft add VR support to the Xbox Series X? Let us know down in the comments below!
This week, Microsoft revealed the basic specifications of its upcoming Xbox Series X console, and they show it’s more than powerful enough to support high end VR.
This is despite the fact that Microsoft has made clear that it has no current plans for VR on Xbox. A few weeks ago, UploadVR’s Jamie Feltham argued that Series X doesn’t need VR support. Now that these specs are known, I’d argue quite the opposite.
CPU: AMD’s latest Zen 2 architecture (used for PC Ryzen 3000 series)
Microsoft also revealed some important features the GPU supports:
Variable Rate Shading (allows different parts of the screen or different objects to be rendered at different resolutions)
Hardware Accelerated Raytracing (like NVIDIA RTX, this enables significantly more realistic lighting)
120Hz Support
HDMI 2.1 w/ Variable Refresh Rate
12 teraflops means the Series X is by far the most powerful console ever announced. For comparison, the Xbox One S GPU is around 1.4 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X GPU around 6 TFLOPS.
Sony’s PS4 Pro, which already supports virtual reality well, clocks in at 4.2 TFLOPs. The PlayStation 5 is rumored to hit 9.2 TFLOPS, but this is unconfirmed.
Variable Rate Shading support means this new Xbox could technically even support next generation VR headsets which use foveated rendering to achieve much higher resolution and field of view.
Microsoft: No Plans For Xbox VR
Somewhat ironically, despite headlining its blog post, “What You Can Expect From the Next Generation of Gaming”, Microsoft made no mention of virtual reality.
As early as November of last year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer suggested the next Xbox supporting virtual reality would be unlikely, claiming “nobody’s asking for VR”.
Earlier this month Spencer seemed to walk back these comments slightly, but was still clear that the console won’t support VR at launch and suggested that Microsoft isn’t even working on it yet. Previous reports suggest Microsoft shelved VR support for its Xbox One X console, which it first publicly announced as a VR-capable machine.
With such powerful hardware in a mass market consumer package, this would be a huge missed opportunity for both Microsoft and the VR industry if it never came to pass.
Surely Microsoft can see that lower cost wireless headset with inside-out tracking could make VR a significant percentage of console gaming?
Facebook/Valve Partnership?
If Microsoft doesn’t see the value in investing the resources to build an Xbox VR platform, it’s puzzling why the company doesn’t simply partner with an existing PC VR platform.
Xbox consoles essentially run a modified version of the Windows operating system, using the same DirectX graphics API. Long gone are the days when consoles used exotic architectures or custom compute flows- the Series X CPU and GPU are very similar to what a PC gamer building a rig later this year might put together.
In this age of cross-platform play, where a gamer can sign into Xbox Live in a PlayStation 4 game or invite Steam friends to play a Microsoft Studios game, surely the new Microsoft, a company built on lucrative partnerships, would consider talking to Facebook and/or Valve?
The Oculus Rift and SteamVR platforms are relatively mature, already work on Windows 10, and each company would likely jump at the chance to expand their market. Adding Win32 support and the necessary APIs to Xbox could allow either of these platforms to run on the Xbox console.
Just like with the MP3 player and smartphone however, Microsoft may once again be falling back on its corporate culture of playing it safe until it’s too late. If Sony invests heavily in PlayStation 5 VR and releases an affordable wireless headset, Microsoft may once again find itself scrambling to catch up.
Poor Phil Spencer; no one wants him to like VR. Every time Microsoft’s Xbox guru opens his mouth to explain his stance on the technology, only the negative points seem to make the headlines, even when he’s trying to clarify any misunderstanding around previous pessimism.
Even this week’s comments, in which Spencer tried to plainly explain Xbox’s thinking around VR and its understandable-yet-frustrating patience with the technology, resulted in some ugly takes. Call me a turncoat, but I do sympathize with him. Not because he’s often taken out of context on the subject, but because I agree with him.
Microsoft could release an amazing VR headset for its Xbox Series X console, of that I have no doubt. The company has previous iterations to build off of and the library of quality of VR content is slowly but surely growing into a worthwhile proposition (no doubt set to be greatly bolstered by next month’s release of Half-Life: Alyx). But it is also true that Xbox’s vision for the future of gaming — and to put the brand back on top of the industry wars — has filled its plate with enough short and long-term goals, with little room left for VR on the side. That’s a meal unto itself.
The future of Xbox is the incredible value in its Games Pass line-up, the accessibility of its Project Xcloud streaming platform, and a careful balancing act of multiple tiers of console that, presumably, will range from an affordable 4K console for the masses and a more demanding machine for enthusiasts wanting to inspect every blade of grass and water droplet falling from the sky. Though there’s a lot of risk involved with taking these chances, collectively they paint an optimistic picture of greater accessibility in an industry that struggled to expand its demographics in the past few decades.
VR threatens to throw an awkward wrench into that multitude of focuses. The question of when traditional game streaming, for example, will be good enough for prime time remains unanswered even after the release of Google’s Stadia platform. Adding VR on top of that requires performance even beyond the base standards we’d expect now.
What, too, would become of VR on two tiers of Xbox consoles? The gap between the base PS4 and PS4 Pro is often a pain point for developers, with the latter far more capable of maintaining the quality of the original PC titles. Would we see another generation of held-back games suffering from release parity clauses across consoles?
No doubt, there is uncertainty ahead for Microsoft’s gaming business. Especially as it finds itself on the back foot at the tail end of a console generation. Its mission to reverse fortunes is one of brute force ambition, but the uncertain waters of VR might prove a little too stormy for this experimental phase.
Microsoft can operate comfortably in the knowledge that Sony, Facebook and Valve will keep VR in its increasingly healthy incubation stage until it is ready to go a step further. Until then, what is there to really be gained from jumping into the game this early? Certainly not much money, and the lessons VR is learning are very public. Quest’s standalone nature shows that wires and external trackers need to go; two things that Microsoft itself already knows.
Not to mention that Xbox, as a brand, has a history of biding its time. Microsoft didn’t jump into the console business until Nintendo and Sony were on their second 3D gaming machines. True, there was some catch up to play in the first generation of Xbox but the follow-up 360 console saw it comfortably lead in front of Sony for a good portion of that generation.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar situation here. Let PSVR and Quest continue to work out VR’s kinks and then, when a path to explosive profit is clear, come out swinging with, say, a full Halo VR game. make it a headset that supports both Xbox One Series X and PCs. Microsoft owns studios with VR expertise already; it wouldn’t take too long to establish an enviable stable of games to compete with Sony and Facebook. It may not have left the gates yet, but Microsoft’s horse is still very much in this race.
All that is too say that I’m confident Xbox VR will still happen and that Microsoft is shrewd not to be gunning for it too early. In early 2020, it seems quite sure that VR isn’t going anywhere, at least for the next few years. If the industry manages to make it beyond that goal? That’s when Phil Spencer needs to change tact.
Late last year Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s Head of Xbox, caused a bit of a stir up in the VR industry when he stated that “nobody” was asking for Xbox VR support.
Spencer later clarified that, while he liked VR, it wasn’t the company’s focus for its new console, now known as Xbox One Series X. This week Spencer expanded on his statements even further, adding that he hopes the VR industry will become big enough that Xbox VR support will one day be a “no brainer” for the company.
Spencer said as much on the most recent episode of the Gamertag Radio podcast. Starting just past the 26-minute mark, he again explained that his past comments weren’t intended to disrespect VR, but make it clear Series X wouldn’t be supporting it on day one.
“There are a lot of people I know that are working on some good VR titles – great VR titles – and I’m not trying to be not supportive of that,” he clarified. “My main point was, I wanted to be clear with our customers on where our focus was. So that if somebody was waiting for us to bring out a VR headset for Series X, at the launch or something… we’re not going to do that.”
He continued explaining that, while he knew some people wanted an Xbox VR headset, Microsoft’s current resources were best spent on the things it’s already working on, including its cloud gaming service, Project XCloud, among other things.
“I don’t hope it goes away: I hope it gets bigger,” Spencer later concluded. “I hope it’s something that’s so important that it would be a no-brainer for us to go support it. My main point, in that statement wasn’t to shade anybody who’s working on VR or anything but really just about the stuff that we’re focused on right now and that’s not part of the equation right now.”
Rumors suggested that Microsoft shelved plans for an Xbox One VR headset a few years ago after first teasing that the Xbox One X could support ‘high fidelity VR’. Spencer’s comments this week suggest that any possible Xbox VR effort is still years out at the earliest.
Australian publication Stevivor recently sat down with Xbox head Phil Spencer to broach the subject of whether or not the company’s upcoming next-gen console would be matching Sony’s continued VR ambitions with PlayStation 5. The short of it: Spencer says it’s simply not a focus for Scarlett.
“I have some issues with VR — it’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience,” Spencer told Stevivor at X019. “We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR. The vast majority of our customers know if they want a VR experience, there’s places to go get those. We see the volumes of those on PC and other places.”
Firing back at Spencer’s assertion that “nobody’s asking for VR,” Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida maintained Sony is still working hard despite the lack of wide-spread support:
（´-`）.｡oO（we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for them）
Later, Spencer took to Twitter to reaffirm his views, saying that while he has played VR games in the past, including Valve’s upcoming Half-Life: Alyx, it’s still not going to be a focus for Scarlett:
Fair feedback. I've said publically, I love how our industry has pioneered: AI, physics, 3D, RT, VR/AR etc. For us, it's about focus on our innovations right now. I've played some great VR games, I got to play HL:Alyx in the summer, amazing. It's just not our focus with Scarlett
Project Scarlett’s big reveal at E3 2019 included no mention of VR support despite it’s fundamentally a VR-ready system, which is based on Zen 2 and Navi processors from AMD, and hailed as “four times more powerful than the Xbox One X.”
It’s not to say we weren’t holdouts for a surprise announcement though, as Microsoft has under their Microsoft Studios umbrella a surprising amount of talent with previous experience in making VR games including Ninja Theory (Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice), 343 Industries (Halo Recruit), inXile (The Mage’s Tale), Double Fine (Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin), and Mojang (Minecraft).
If there’s a silver lining in all of this, at least Xbox is staying consistent with their messaging from the get-go with Scarlett, as the company had been kicking the metaphorical ‘VR can’ down the road ever since they originally announced their intentions back at E3 2016 to bring “high fidelity VR” to Xbox One X. It wasn’t until June of last year that Spencer dashed all hopes of bringing VR to Xbox One consoles.
And in the end, it’s likely Xbox is focused on more than just bringing a more powerful console to the table, as the company continues its push to acquire first and second-party studios and game titles, improve Xbox Game Pass, and further develop xCloud, the company’s cloud-based game streaming service. Further splitting its attention by adding VR in at this late stage could simply be too much to ask, as Scarlett wouldn’t be able to benefit in the same way PS5 will when it launches with backwards compatibility for first-gen PSVR headsets.
Geoff Keighley wasn’t the only games industry veteran keeping Half-Life: Alyx a secret. Microsoft’s Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has played it too and he thinks it’s “amazing”.
Spencer said as much in a recent tweet replying to criticism of comments he made about VR reported earlier this week. In a recently-published interview, Spencer said that VR wasn’t Microsoft’s focus for its next Xbox console, codenamed Scarlett. He reasoned that “no one was asking” for VR support on an Xbox console, thus the company was looking into other areas.
His comments were met with widespread criticism, including a jab from Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida himself. Many noted that Xbox’s lack of interest in VR would likely mean Microsoft loses out on having the highly-anticipated Half-Life: Alyx playable on its next console.
“‘Ive [sic] said publically, I love how our industry has pioneered: AI, physics, 3D, RT, VR/AR etc,” Spencer said on Twitter. “For us, it’s about focus on our innovations right now. I’ve played some great VR games, I got to play HL:Alyx in the summer, amazing. It’s just not our focus with Scarlett.”
Well, there’s that.
It’d be tempting to say that Alyx wasn’t enough to convince Spencer to change up his stance on VR, but that would be oversimplifying the situation for sure. And that’s not to say that Scarlett, due for release next year, will never get VR support. But it certainly seems like Microsoft won’t have a competitor to PSVR 2 whenever that rolls around.
Does Microsoft’s stance on VR turn you off of getting the next-generation Xbox? Would Half-Life: Alyx on Xbox change your mind? Let us know in the comments below!
Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida made a comment on Twitter that seemed directed at Phil Spencer’s suggestion that nobody is asking for VR, in relation to Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox, codenamed Scarlett.
Microsoft’s Head of Xbox Phil Spencer suggested that VR support for the next generation of Xbox was unlikely in a recent comment. “I have some issues with VR — it’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience,” Spencer explained. “We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR. The vast majority of our customers know if they want a VR experience, there’s places to go get those. We see the volumes of those on PC and other places.”
“I think we might get there [eventually],” Spencer concluded. “But yeah, that’s not where our focus is.”
Following the comments from Spencer, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida posted a comment on Twitter that seemed to respond to Spencer’s assertion that ‘nobody’s asking for VR.’
“（´-`）.｡oO（we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for them.”
We should note that as of March this year, Sony had sold over 4.2 million PSVR headsets – making it very clear that there is an audience for VR support on consoles.
In contrast to Xbox Scarlett, Sony’s next console, the PlayStation 5, will support VR – that being said, at launch it will only support the current generation of PSVR, and the next generation, PSVR 2, probably won’t launch alongside the PS5.
How do you feel about Shuhei Yoshida and Phil Spencer’s comments on VR? Let us know down below.
If you were holding your breath for Xbox Scarlett VR support, best stop.
Xbox head Phil Spencer recently reemphasized his reservations with VR to Stevivor, saying that it was “not where our focus is”. That suggests it won’t come to the next generation console, codenamed Scarlett.
“I have some issues with VR — it’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience,” Spencer explained. “We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR. The vast majority of our customers know if they want a VR experience, there’s places to go get those. We see the volumes of those on PC and other places.”
The Xbox brand has a shaky history with VR. After originally closely aligning itself with Facebook’s Oculus, Microsoft stated that its upgraded Xbox One console, Xbox One X, would be capable of “high fidelity VR”. That support never materialized, while reports suggested a possible Xbox VR headset had been put on hold.
Meanwhile, Microsoft does sell a range of Windows-based PC VR headsets, though Steam Hardware Survey data suggests these have struggled to take off.
“I think we might get there [eventually],” Spencer concluded. “But yeah, that’s not where our focus is.”
It’s a shame, given that Xbox recently acquired some great studios that have made VR games like inXile and Ninja Theory. Spencer’s words suggest we might not see them make new VR titles in the future past their previously-announced projects.
Plus it also means that Sony will likely be the only console maker with a VR headset next-generation (no, we’re not counting Labo VR). It’s widely expected that the PS5, set for release next year, will support a successor to PSVR as well as the original headset.
Will you miss Xbox Scarlett VR support? Let us know in the comments below!
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday (usually) in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.
Theoretically, this would be a great move. The Rift S has built-in tracking with its inside-out system that allows for a high-quality 6DOF headset and two 6DOF controllers. Although, support for a Windows Mixed Reality device (like the HP Reverb or Samsung Odyssey) would make more sense logistically since that’s running on the Microsoft ecosystem. Either choice would be solid for consumers though.
Consumer VR will be in the middle of its fifth year of existence by the time the Xbox Scarlett releases and Sony will be releasing or at least prepping the release of its second PSVR headset while Oculus, HTC, Valve, and the PC side of Microsoft all continue pushing their VR options forward.
So, the question at hand is this: Does Xbox Scarlett need to support VR? Does it make sense for them as a company by that point — if not, why not?
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
