Do you expect Half Life Alyx to have a significant change on VR?

@Metallic_Blade: Please explain how Half-Life: Alyx is a half-ass VR tech demo. It looks like a full AAA game to me.

Nope

Because they have to buy VR for that - an expensive accessory. Funny thing people don't realize is all games require investment in order to enjoy them. GPUs, CPUs , monitors etc. I know I have upgraded my entire system to Play Crysis as well as many others.

I mean you don't have to buy it outright, wait a couple of years or even for deals if you don't want to pay such price. It's not like it's a bought exclusivity. In case of this game it may very well could only be possible on VR.

@BassMan: It does look like a full game, sucks it has to be tied to a gimmick like VR. Hopefully when it doesn't sell we'll get the standard version of the game.

It looks like probably the best kind of thing that can be made with current VR tech, but sadly that isn't appealing to me. I think I'd be very sick playing this and I wish they could have made a non-VR version... but it's very obvious why they wouldn't.

Eh. I've never worshipped at the feet of Valve or Half-Life anyway so not gonna lose sleep over it.

I mean, they do only and exactly what's best for them to make money. They're billionaire profiteers, not compassionate guardians. They do have a hell of a brand though, I'll give them that. To be so well thought of while extracting middleman fees from every other PC developer and rarely even bothering to make their own games anymore is... impressive.

You say that VR is brilliant and only poor, stupid assholes disagree, and wonder what people's "problem" is? Lol.

My main problem with VR is that it makes me sick to my stomach, but a strong second place is the raving cult surrounding it.

Btw, "Lol you're too poor to afford this!" is, in my experience, usually a projection from someone trying to suppress thoughts of "Oh **** why did I spend so much money on this!". I recall being told I was too poor to buy a 600 euro launch PS3 as well, heh. In any case, resorting to attacks like that says more about you than any gamer who just isn't into VR, for whatever reason.

Oh, and I DO hope it's good, btw ;)

There won't be any other version. The game is designed specifically for VR.

According to the Steam hardware survey, a mere 0.38% of Steam users even own a VR headset. There are around 90-milion active users on Steam. Even if every single person who owns VR capable hardware buys this Alyx game, that will be a whopping 342,000 units sold, so even if it sells as well as possible, meaning 100% attach rate among VR owners, it will still be a financial failure.

Maybe. This could be the killer app that finally takes the FPS genre in a VR direction. Or the VR could just end up being a gimmick.

I think a lot certain people both on and off this forum are seriously underestimating Valve.

This is not some company that needs to bang out games on a regular basis or even really needs to be pressurised into hitting a sales target. Compared to other companies chasing trends like EA Valve essentially do whatever creative freedom takes their fancy, due to Steam, another one of their crack-pot ideas people relentlessly bitched about. "from acorns do mighty oaks grow", as the saying goes, if VR can become a solid platform with prices lowering, better implementation and higher quality software, great? If they fail, it will be a noble failure.

Judging from the 5 million views in just a few hours, it's pretty clearly got peoples attention.

@locopatho: hey man I don't care if you dislike VR because you don't find it fun, or it makes you sick, or any other valid reason. I wasn't trying to give folks like you a hard time. I was trying to give the jackasses that dislike VR out of spite a hard time.

As for Valve, agree to disagree. Yes, they are a business so obviously profit is priority number 1. But at the same time, they do a lot of good for the industry.

My personal feelings are that they have more important things to do than simply make games. Between Steam, VR, and all the other innovations they work on, it doesn't leave much time for games. And frankly I am OK with that because we already get a ton of great games every year/month/week.

Yeah I'd love Half-Life 3, but I also love what Valve already does. So I am OK with this.

How would it be a financial failure? Valve will receive 100% of this profit. At 59.99 that'd be over 20 million dollars; I would think that'd be enough to cover the cost of development of an in-house game that uses proprietary, also in-house tech.

Do your statistics also include Oculus and other brands of headsets that can play this?

I don't discount your argument that the game won't sell a crazy amount of copies, but will it sell enough copies? Probably.

@mrbojangles25: I doubt most Half Life fanboys are going to pass up HL:Alyx, so I reckon its going to sell more than enough.

Exactly.

If a studio like Ninja Theory can make a game like Senua's Sacrifice with the hope of merely breaking even (though it went on to make massive profit), then Valve can certainly roll the dice on a VR game that promotes one of their sectors of interest.

Possibly, I'm not sure though.

I mean hasn't all of the original talent that worked on the series already left Valve? They haven't even developed a new game in like 7 years, I'm very cautious to say the least.

According to recent Geoff interview, 1/3 of the original team who have worked on Half Life 2 (and some even on Half Life 1!) are back on this project. The writers of Portal 2 and composer of Portal/Left 4 Dead is back working on this. A large portion of Campo Santo if not all (the team that made Firewatch and was acquired by Valve) are helping with this game as well.

Valve also said that Half Life Alyx is made by their largest team yet, at about 50 ppl. I found that figure rather stunning. How small were the previous teams that worked on Half Life 2, Portal 1-2 and L4D 1-2? It's amazing what they accomplished with fewer than 50 employees.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft sometimes has 700-1000 ppl on a game and it's still a buggy, unpolished nightmare. I remember reading that Valve is one of the hardest companies to get into, and they lean more towards veteran workers who have seen a lot of battle in the industry. I think it's obvious Valve doesn't hire weak talent, and that is why so many of their games are held in high regard.

If this is a fully fledged game and not some 3-5 hour game like so many VR games, it might have enough impact for VR to take off a little more.

I lean towards No, but if anyone could move the needle for VR it could be Valve. Half Life has the cultural relevance at least with the enthusiast of the medium, and graphics do more to sell a game than gameplay, and if Valve can make a technical wonder for VR they can move some headsets. Especially when their game isn't exclusive to a specific headset.

It's play-test was around the same time as Halflife 2 with Dorito Pope tweeting it took 13 hours.

Some ant-VR folk are still running around trying to call it a tech demo. Jim Sterling even resorted to "disabled people can't use it".

I'm guessing he means specifically him, being dangerously obese that his heart would most likely pack in within 20 minutes of strenuous use.

Not only that but Valve gives their devs time to work on the game. Ubisoft has 700-1000 but they're spent trying to make yearly or dual yearly releases. They barely get anytime to build a game from scratch, they just keep building on an outdated engine/source code. Hence why games like Call Of Duty and Assassin's Creed have so many technical issues.

Well that's good, that's my only real issue with VR is game length.

@uninspiredcup: Her lips are a little out of proportion aren't they?

Anyway, I can't say I'm hugely interested in a vr half life prequel.

We'll see how successful it is, but I'd much rather see a proper fully fledged half life 3.

That 0.38% includes any brand of VR headset. And your $20-million figure assumes that every single Steam user who owns a VR headset will buy Half-Life: Alyx, and that's certainly not guaranteed. My prediction is that they'll move maybe 100,000 copies, which would bring the revenue (not profit) down to $6-million, which is nothing for a AAA game from a major game developer. But I guess since Valve has so many sources of revenue, they can take a hit on one of their major franchises and be none the worse for it.

Trailer looks pretty nice, but I'm not bothering if I can't mod it to 2D. I know the community will try. Again, VR kits are too low res. The couple of thousand pixels are right in front of your eyes. Bring your face really close to your monitor and notice how shitty that is. The fact that a VR kit has many times the resolution of the space you're looking at on your monitor (if you did what I told you to do) still doesn't completely mitigate the problem. You can see the pixels.

The Valve Index® VR Kit page doesn't even have any mention of HDR. Crazy considering how much these VR machines cost.

https://store.steampowered.com/sub/354231/

Someone on Reddit asked why VR kits don't support HDR. Apparently, it's because they can't get bright enough while maintaining low persistence. Lame. Lame, lame, lame.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/cg36sq/why_does_the_index_or_any_vr_headset_not_have_hdr/

100,000 copies is a bit of a big underestimation. Beat Saber sold 100,000 copies its first month and its a rhythm game that doesn't have the brand power and high level exposure that Valve and the Half Life series can give it. Cmon this is Half Life it could easily pull those type of numbers in its first week especially with how starved people are for a new Half Life game or a singleplayer game from Valve in general. The game is getting great reception from the community despite being VR only unlike Diablo Immortal and Command & Conquer Rivals which got disliked into oblivion for not being PC games. Valve couldn't have a chose a better time to reveal Half Life: Alyx because now with Black Friday happening next week and people's interest in Half Life being sparked again will look into what deals they can get for VR headsets. Supporting Windows Mixed Reality headsets was also a very smart decision because the cheapest headset which is the HP one is under $200 so that's a very accessible price. Microcenter is selling the HP WMR headset for $130 right now. This isn't to mention that Valve has at least two other VR games in the works so it gives people some incentive to hold on to their headsets instead of chucking out them after playing HL:A.

Yes and no. I think it will push VR more into the mainstream, but I don't think it would have more impact than HL1 did for cinematic gaming and 2 for state-of-the-art facial animations and physics at the time.

@Pedro: I'll easily pass it up and I LOVE HL, but I also dislike VR so this isnt getting any love from me.

In terms of showing what VR can do: yes. some of the criticisms it will inevitably get (no game is perfect) will also probably stem from some inherent limits in current VR tech (how will they deal with player movement? That will be interesting to see. In most VR games i have played player movement has been a bit rough.).

But i think it will be one of the big go to game for showing off what VR can really do.

Will it tempt more people at looking into getting VR? well the index kit is now back up to the top selling item on steam last i checked. so it is having some impact. Judging by even the negative reactions: well people are thinking about VR more again.

The price of entry is still not trivial though and it is giving people pause. At the lower to mid end you are looking at the price of a console just for the headset and controller AND you need a good PC to back it up (for HL:A anyway). It's good that valve have not tied this exclusively to the index. Hell i wouldn't be surprised to see a Port to the PS5/PSVR2 and maybe even release it on the oculus store at some point.

VR needs some big hitters though. I think valve know they probably wont make much money off alyx (at least in terms of direct sales). but VR, like any form of gaming, is still governed by the one universal truth: software, not specs, sell hardware. VR needs system sellers. Not many are going to buy VR just for VR...they need a compelling reason to buy it.

If this and valves other games deliver then it's going to make people sit up and take notice. They may cry and scream and swear and complain that its VR exclusive but, in the end, they will suck it up and take the plunge if the compelling content is there.

It will be good, I don't doubt that. Everything Valve has made so far for VR, from their hardware to the VR experiences in The Lab have been among the most dedicated and devoted experiences you can have in VR right now.

I don't think it will be enough by its self to make that much of a change, we could do with several high caliber VR games each year. many of the people crying about a game being VR only will likely fold and give VR a try when there are five+ highly rated and much-praised games each year for them to keep hearing about their friends enjoying on social media.

I hope the game does really well and encourages more effort from other big developers/publishers because the half-arsed VR conversions (ala SkyrimVR/FO4VR) aren't really cutting it.

That's Fakefactory. He's to modding what David Cage is to gaming, le arteest. The real way to make a game look good is to spam as much shit as possible, rub it all with charcoal and yellow puke, and then model with Alyx breast implants and vagina with Hans Zimmer booming at every opportunity.

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Beat Saber was available on multiple platforms. Half-Life: Alyx, as far as I know, is a PC/Steam exclusive, and at the moment, there are less than 400,000 Steam users who even have the hardware capable of playing it.

I don't know about VR (couldn't care less about it). But what I'm wondering is if Valve is doing this doing to gauge interest in HL3 more... like they did with the HL2 episodes that they never finished.

Why would they need to gouge HL3 interest? It was would very obviously sell by the bucket loads, probably more than this game, especially if they went multiplatform.

Trying to push VR as a medium, pretty simple.

Can’t vote on this because I am not sure how it will go. Also you don’t need an index to play this game. A Rift S or Quest with link will be compatible for it. So you don’t need to spend a 1000 dollars on a VR setup. I expect both of those to be on sale for Black Friday so you should be able to get one for under 400. At the same time though I don’t know how many people will be interested in VR. Responses I’ve read online seem to be mixed. There’s anger and interest. I love VR. Asgard’s Wrath is a full AAA title I’m playing now. I will be getting Half Life Alyx too.

@Metallic_Blade: it’s a full game not a tech demo. Will be about the same length in gameplay as half life 2

The first month Beat Saber sold 100,000 copies it was only available for Windows Mixed Reality, Vive and Oculus. The PSVR version came out 5 months after. There shouldn't just be 400,000 people with VR capable PCs because Valve announced that as of June 2019 announced they have over 1 million Steam users with VR headsets connected monthly.

According to Steam survey there shouldn't just be 400,000 people with VR capable PCs but 53.6 million based on the assumption that there is 200 million active Steam users now since at the beginning of 2015 there was 125 million users with 8.9 million on concurrently now Steam peaks at over 16 million users concurrently which is almost double the amount since early 2015. The GTX 1060 which is not only the most popular card on the Steam hardware survey but the recommend GPU to run VR and is the minimum requirement for Half Life: Alyx. With an estimate 14.98% share 200 million users that is an estimated potential 29.6 million VR users for just that GPU alone.

Interesting, gotta watch that interview

I'm a little late here but as a Half-Life fan I'm not interested with this game. I just wish that we get Half-Life 3 and not a VR game.

@uninspiredcup:

Nope. And as cynical as it sounds, I don't expect people to change their minds about VR either. The industry has moved on since Half Life 2 episode 2. Most gamers like me don't even care about Half Life anymore.

It's already caused a change. People who were previously uninterested in VR are now shopping for headsets and such.