In an interview with Glixel, Epic Gaming's Tim Sweeney has indicated that he believes that VR will be as widely accepted and used by the end of the next decade as smart phones are today. In addition, he believes that consoles are in a "significant" downturn given the lackluster sales over the past holiday season.
In a 13-minute peroration at the end of his keynote address, Sweeney compared VR to teleportation and world-historical events like the dawn of agriculture. "The next stage of mankind's development," he said, "is the pervasive ability of anybody to connect with anybody else to live a life that's unconstrained by physical goods."
All of the retail console sales data this holiday season indicated that the console market is going through a really significant downturn. I don't think it's seasonal. I think what we're really facing is that young new gamers aren't going into consoles. And so there's this audience of increasingly aged gamers like a lot of us at Epic, who are sticking with it – but some are dropping out. Ultimately, the games that you can get and watch continually improve over the course of many years are far more engaging and reliable than this model of releasing a new game every Christmas and trying to convince everybody to buy it again.
Read the full interview at the link above.
What do you think of Sweeney's projections for the future? Let us know!
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