– Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.
This is the year virtual reality headsets hit store shelves in a big way, but Take-Two chief Strauss Zelnick is less than bullish on VR’s mainstream appeal — at least, for the moment.
Speaking today in New York at the 44th annual Cowen and Company Tech, Media & Telecom conference, Zelnick told an audience of investors and financial analysts that VR is just “way too expensive right now.”
“I don’t know what people could be thinking,” Zelnick said, according to GameSpot. “Maybe some of the people in this room have a room to dedicate to an entertainment activity, but back here in the real world? That’s not what we have in America.”
He went on to suggest that the lion’s share of Americans can’t accommodate a dedicated room-scale VR setup and can’t afford to spend more than “like $300” on an entertainment device, which would put them outside the market for VR headsets like the $600 Oculus Rift or $800 HTC Vive.
“I’m not unexcited [about VR], I’m just saying it remains to be seen,” added Zelnick. “There are impediments.”
While Zelnick seems to have positioned himself as going against the grain of popular VR opinion, his comments are actually well in line with many VR market watchers — including analysts who have pegged 2016 as a “proof of concept year” for VR and Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, who warned Gamasutra earlier this year that developers should be “realistic” about VR right now.
“Developers should be realistic,” Palmer told Gamasutra in March. “Don’t believe the most optimistic things the analysts say. Especially when those analysts don’t actually know anything about VR.”
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