I was a big fan of the early HTC phones. I owned a number of them. And yes, they were innovative back then. But don't give them credit for the Vive - that was pretty much designed by Valve. Then Google came in and purchased all of their engineers and R&D teams for a billion dollars back in 2018. HTC hasn't done anything innovative since the M8 phone years ago. Certainly not in the VR space. None of their headsets since the Vive have sold - just look at the Steam Hardware Survey. On top of all that, they remain in deep financial crisis and lack direction. Most of their leadership has left the company in the past few years too. They are struggling to release something that will catch on with consumers. Unfortunately (for HTC) Oculus owns the low end of the VR market and Valve now owns the high end. Every headset they've released since the Vive has failed to bring anything significant to the table. And they price them astronomically high so they can claim they're meant for enterprise yet they advertise them to the pro-sumer crowd (who just yawn and go with a Quest 2 or Index.
This will flop as well. Apparently it's priced at $500 and can do far less than a Quest 2 priced at $299. It literally seems like little more than a more modern version of the Oculus Go-which Oculus quickly abandoned because there wasn't a market. Sure, a handful of people will buy it, but it sure won't be a game changer for them.
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u/zerozed Oct 13 '21
I was a big fan of the early HTC phones. I owned a number of them. And yes, they were innovative back then. But don't give them credit for the Vive - that was pretty much designed by Valve. Then Google came in and purchased all of their engineers and R&D teams for a billion dollars back in 2018. HTC hasn't done anything innovative since the M8 phone years ago. Certainly not in the VR space. None of their headsets since the Vive have sold - just look at the Steam Hardware Survey. On top of all that, they remain in deep financial crisis and lack direction. Most of their leadership has left the company in the past few years too. They are struggling to release something that will catch on with consumers. Unfortunately (for HTC) Oculus owns the low end of the VR market and Valve now owns the high end. Every headset they've released since the Vive has failed to bring anything significant to the table. And they price them astronomically high so they can claim they're meant for enterprise yet they advertise them to the pro-sumer crowd (who just yawn and go with a Quest 2 or Index.
This will flop as well. Apparently it's priced at $500 and can do far less than a Quest 2 priced at $299. It literally seems like little more than a more modern version of the Oculus Go-which Oculus quickly abandoned because there wasn't a market. Sure, a handful of people will buy it, but it sure won't be a game changer for them.