10 Reasons VR Is Just A Passing Fad

Pretty much everyone can agree that technology is driven by trends, but that said, not every new tech innovation is here to stay, and that just might be the case with VR gaming, which has been on lips of just about everyone over the past few years.

While VR as a concept may very well live on in architecture, medicine, robotics and countless other fields, VR gaming on the other hand could easily become yet another fad that's either forgotten, laughed about or viewed with utter indifference sometime down the line, as so many prior gaming "revolutions" have been.

Remember the N-Gage? No?

Of course, VR could capture the public's imagination and become a runaway success that changes gaming forever more, and that'd be a wonderful thing if the kinks can get worked out, but the odds aren't exactly in its favour.

Here are 10 reasons VR is just a passing fad...

There have been a lot of comparisons between the current VR movement and the huge motion control boom of the mid-2000s, where the Nintendo Wii popularised the technology before Microsoft and Sony released their own less-popular iterations.

It's hard to argue with the Wii's success, sure, but motion control was very much a bubble that burst once the Wii's versatility had been exhausted, and Microsoft's botched attempt to reinvigorate it with the Kinect 2.0 pretty much sealed its fate.

Though VR is being heavily talked-up at present, could it not simply be something we become exhausted with over the next five years or so? We'll see the limitations, the novelty will wear off, and we'll crave the more traditionally gratifying experience of holding a controller and staring at a TV screen. History is not on VR's side in this regard.

In VR's Defense: Motion and VR are of course not necessarily comparable, and previous trends do not always dictate future ones, especially when it comes to something as potentially immersive as VR, whereas motion was more aggressively a gimmick geared towards the non-gamer crowd.