Valve Index now available in Canada ! Here are the prices !

[MoistyShagger]

[The Benjamins]

Its sad how much the Index is a failure. 

[Ashleyyyy]

requirements: dualcore

uses Athlon 64 X2

[Princess Luna]

14 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

Its sad how much the Index is a failure. 

VALVe had to bring the Half-Life franchise from the dead to try stop losing money on these haha, I wanna see how this cash grab is going to play out... likely Artifact version 2.

Spoiler

This is a great shame... VALVe was reference in the industry and now they don't really seem to know how to make games any more.

[Unixsystem]

Spoiler

If the result is that they cut the Index down to $600 or less in the next year, then I hope it keeps failing. 

 

Not because I want VR to fail, but because would very much like one but can't justify it over my current Rift CV1. 

 

[CyanideInsanity]

On 11/21/2019 at 1:36 PM, Princess Luna said:

VALVe had to bring the Half-Life franchise from the dead to try stop losing money on these haha, I wanna see how this cash grab is going to play out... likely Artifact version 2.

  Reveal hidden contents

This is a great shame... VALVe was reference in the industry and now they don't really seem to know how to make games any more.

How is it a cash grab? You don't need the index.

[Paranoid Kami]

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

[TetraSky]

As great as it is spec wise and what not... That's just too much money to me, for something that will be completely outdated within a year or two.

That coupled with the requirement for base stations, tether and what not... No thanks.

VR is still not quite ready for mainstream...

[CyanideInsanity]

17 minutes ago, Paranoid Kami said:

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

For the same reason someone would buy a 2080 ti over A 2060. There are pros and cons, with price being the most obvious one. I wanted better controllers than the wmr ones and the knuckles as they were called back then were what caught my interest, and coming from wmr there was no hardware that carried over. So I'd need the full oculus kit and steamvr base stations. I also wanted to ditch the wmr 1.0 insideout tracking and would rather use base stations for the immediate future.

[Unixsystem]

19 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

something that will be completely outdated within a year or two.

That coupled with the requirement for base stations, tether and what not... No thanks.

VR is still not quite ready for mainstream...

They said the same thing about first generation VR, and it took three years for something to come out that was objectively better across the board - and even then, the Index costs more than the Vive did at launch. 

 

Also, base stations are the only way to get accurate tracking in all situations. It may be less convenient, but unless we get some wild advancements in gyroscope technology there's no way to properly track an object in all positions without some form of camera that is external to the play space. Inside out tracking may be fine for slower games or certain sims (and I think that ideally future headsets should include inside out hardware in addition to base stations), but the best and most popular VR games often require a level of movement that is almost guaranteed to break an IO tracking system. 

 

That said, you're absolutely right that it's not ready for the mainstream, but I think the bigger point is that it probably never will be. No matter how cheap or easy to run it becomes, most people won't want to clear out a room in order to walk in circles and look goofy. No matter how much fun it actually is, I think the majority of the public won't ever see the appeal outside of something like an arcade or a demo at a friend's house. 

[realpetertdm]

On 11/22/2019 at 3:29 AM, The Benjamins said:

Its sad how much the Index is a failure. 

How is it a failure?

[realpetertdm]

On 11/22/2019 at 3:36 AM, Princess Luna said:

VALVe had to bring the Half-Life franchise from the dead to try stop losing money on these haha, I wanna see how this cash grab is going to play out... likely Artifact version 2.

  Reveal hidden contents

This is a great shame... VALVe was reference in the industry and now they don't really seem to know how to make games any more.

 

Can you stop talking about things you don't know about? Like, seriously, don't.

 

This specific title was in development at least since 2016. Source code leaks were happening since summer of 2016 and continued until late 2018.

 

Valve Index was revealed on April 2019. So according to you Valve saw that the Index wasn't "doing too well" (lmao), traveled back in time to 2016 and made HLA? Yeah, that sounds about right.

 

15 hours of excellent VR gameplay for $60? Total cash grab guys, fuck Valve right?

[xAcid9]

Index is great but the price is just too steep for me.

 

[realpetertdm]

4 hours ago, Paranoid Kami said:

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

 People who want the best VR experience.

 

I can buy a GTX 1660 at newegg for $300, who would buy the RTX 2080 Ti for $2000?

 

People who want the best fucking experience, duh.

[dizmo]

I like the idea of VR, but I won't invest until the quality is higher, the headset is half the thickness, and it doesn't require cameras other than what's built into the headset. Oh, and wireless. I don't care if they require a special adapter for wireless; some kind of proprietary signal..I just want it wireless. 

 

On 11/21/2019 at 11:36 AM, Princess Luna said:

VALVe had to bring the Half-Life franchise from the dead to try stop losing money on these haha, I wanna see how this cash grab is going to play out... likely Artifact version 2.

  Reveal hidden contents

This is a great shame... VALVe was reference in the industry and now they don't really seem to know how to make games any more.

Haha, if you think Valve cares about losing money, you don't know the company at all. The money they lose on these is tiny...both because of their cost, and the number sold. They're fully behind VR, and they'll play the long game to get there. 

4 hours ago, Paranoid Kami said:

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

I don't know about this one, but doesn't the Vive have better games and better hardware? 

3 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

That said, you're absolutely right that it's not ready for the mainstream, but I think the bigger point is that it probably never will be. No matter how cheap or easy to run it becomes, most people won't want to clear out a room in order to walk in circles and look goofy. No matter how much fun it actually is, I think the majority of the public won't ever see the appeal outside of something like an arcade or a demo at a friend's house. 

Saying never when it comes to tech is a very foolish thing to say. It will very likely happen, especially if a company like Valve is fully behind it. It's only a matter of time before the stations are no longer needed, and the entire thing is contained within the headset. Hell, given a number of years, we won't even need a PC to run it. 

[amdorintel]

its another fad

it wont last

like 3d tv's

 

[Rune]

5 hours ago, Paranoid Kami said:

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

Me.

[Unixsystem]

16 hours ago, dizmo said:

I don't know about this one, but doesn't the Vive have better games and better hardware? 

If you're comparing the original Vive to the Oculus CV1, then neither is objectively better. There are some slight differences in FOV and perceived screen door effect, but generally speaking the specs are roughly on par. The Vive theoretically has better tracking (largely just because it only needs two base stations and they don't use nearly the same USB bandwidth as Oculus's cameras. Meanwhile the Oculus is more lightweight and comfortable, it has built in headphones and the Touch controllers are way more comfortable than the Vive wands, but then again they don't have touchpads which can be much more useful in certain situations. 

 

I've owned both and overall hardware wise I pretty dramatically prefer the Oculus just on comfort alone, but realistically they are pretty much on par. 

 

In terms of games, 98% of VR games are completely cross compatible out of the box, and and the few Oculus exclusives can be played relatively easy on a Vive using some third party software. If you go back and play some of the early SteamVR games that came out before the Oculus Touch controllers and didn't get updated, you can get a bit of control weirdness, but generally speaking every game worth playing is totally playable on any headset that supports SteamVR (aka all of them). 

16 hours ago, dizmo said:

Saying never when it comes to tech is a very foolish thing to say. It will very likely happen, especially if a company like Valve is fully behind it. It's only a matter of time before the stations are no longer needed, and the entire thing is contained within the headset. Hell, given a number of years, we won't even need a PC to run it. 

No matter how good tracking cameras get, they can't track objects that are occluded by other objects. You can have the highest res, most accurate trackers in the world, but if they are on the headset and you put your hand behind your back, or crouch down and its blocked by your leg, then it won't be a good experience. Some day maybe we'll see a major new form of tracking that uses magnetic waves or something crazy to give you un-occuludable tracking, but until then there's no way for inside out tracking to give equivalent results to multiple, externally placed cameras/base stations. 

 

If you're referring to my statement that it'll never be mainstream, then I think that you maybe be slightly biased due to being part of a more enthusiast market. You and I may be way into the idea of having a VR room where we strap on a headset and block out the world for hours at a time, but most normal people aren't going to see that as more than a novelty.

 

Even if phone based VR got to a point where it had the same games and capabilities of desktop headsets, there's a huge subset of the market that would scoff at the idea of strapping a device to their face and looking like a doof. And make no mistake, you look like a doof. 

 

Maybe in a full (human) generation or two the general attitude towards VR will be way more accepting, but unless we get full neural interfaces or something similar there is always going to be a physical and logistical issue in the minds of lots of people in order to set up a VR space. 

 

Also, in terms of "Valve is fully behind it", it took them three years to even announce a first party VR game that isn't just a tech demo. And even then, they were "fully behind" the Steam Link as well as the Steam Controller, and I don't see either of those setting the world on fire. 

 

To be clear, I'm very bullish on VR overall and if I wasn't saving up for a full desktop rebuild I may have bought an Index already. But this mentality that VR needs to "break through to the mainstream" just seems like a wildly flawed perspective on what VR is. And honestly, all of my best and most memorable experiences in VR have been playing wildly niche games with next to zero mainstream appeal (H3VR, Jet Island, etc). 

[Thaldor]

On 11/23/2019 at 8:25 AM, dizmo said:

Saying never when it comes to tech is a very foolish thing to say. It will very likely happen, especially if a company like Valve is fully behind it. It's only a matter of time before the stations are no longer needed, and the entire thing is contained within the headset. Hell, given a number of years, we won't even need a PC to run it. 

Saying that "Valve is fully behind it" is kind of a long shot. Valve is fully behind it and Gaben has stated that he will do anything to make the VR a thing, but they don't plan to burn money on it and try to actually be smart with it. Even with Index you can see that they are holding back and a lot and make moves that are better for the consumer and cheaper for them, like they didn't rush out another thing that directly and completely competes against everything else on the market but made a thing that has it's own kinks and is fully adapted their SteamVR "standards" (SteamVR1.0 is basicly HTC Vive and IIRC SteamVR1.5-2.0 is Vive Pro while Index is complete 2.0 with full support to 1.0) which brings the consumer friendly, if you have Vive or Vive Pro (or IIRC Pimax, they did support Vives tracking(?)) you have options to just buy the controllers with/without headset, you don't need to pay for the basestations.

Very unlike what Facebook... Oculus is doing by throwing probably huge sums to develop the inside-out-tracking and making everything mobile, which in the long run (let's say 10-20 years) doesn't seem to be the best place to put your money currently because we will need to re-invent those again and probably again (the mobile hardware is expiring faster than fast, even the wireless tech is currently not developed to the bar where we can call it better than a hackjob of WiFi and it would be probably better for the wallet to wait for something like Bluetooth 6.0 or something that is perfect latency and bandwidth wise for the VR use, same for the inside-out-tracking, cameras just aren't anywhere near optimal solution but since we currently don't have anything better to handle the job as they want it to be done). I don't mean developing them is stupid, but currently they seem to be very futile because we just don't have the tech to make them the best they could be and all that money could be invested into things that we can still really improve and what we have tech to improve (like better the screens and especially the lenses, there's stuff that can be improved a lot and all it takes is tries tries and tries to find the best way to get the image to the eyes, or then the controllers, we still probably have a lot of tech that could make the controllers better, Valve just demonstrated that they can get "finger-tracking" into the controllers which is kind of cool, but it's still not probably the best that we can currently do) and probably company that makes VR things isn't probably the best company to start to create their own wireless-standard from ground up or start developing their own camera sensors and even in hindsight the best things in VR development have become when someone looked back and thought "can we use this?" like Leap Motion was completely dead before someone took one and glued it to the face of a VR headset and went "oh, cool, I have hand tracking" and in that sentence I can say that I'm really trying to find a Essential Reality P5 Glove because that thing might be the cheapest almost complete hand-tracking system for Vive/Vive Pro that doesn't need line of sight to work (yes, it has awful IR-tracking, but that's not what I'm after, what I'm after is that thing with added Vive Tracker could be something awesome because how small it is and how it "tracks" your fingers).

[RejZoR]

On 11/23/2019 at 2:43 AM, Paranoid Kami said:

I can pick up an Oculus at Best Buy for 550. Who would buy the index for more than double?

Who's gonna buy a 550 bucks VR headset for ONE game?! Paying 550 bucks for a graphic card that can be used for ALL games makes sense. Paying 550 for a headset that can maybe be used for 5 games you might be interested after HL:Alyx, not so much. I'm interested in HL:Alyx, I'm not interested in VR outside of that, meaning I'm as a result also not interested in paying 550 for one game even if its the most epic shit ever.

[porina]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Who's gonna buy a 550 bucks VR headset for ONE game?! Paying 550 bucks for a graphic card that can be used for ALL games makes sense. Paying 550 for a headset that can maybe be used for 5 games you might be interested after HL:Alyx, not so much. I'm interested in HL:Alyx, I'm not interested in VR outside of that, meaning I'm as a result also not interested in paying 550 for one game even if its the most epic shit ever.

Hardware get mass adoption once there is a "killer app" that makes good use of it. Up to then, it is a solution looking for a problem. If Alyx is "it" then momentum in VR will grow faster, and there will be more stuff you might care about. Sadly I'm not convinced it will do that. A few older gamers who like the HL franchise aren't going to do it, and will it be good enough to bring in a new generation? I'm not holding my breath. I doubt it'll do as much as Beat Saber in promoting VR gaming.

[RejZoR]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

Hardware get mass adoption once there is a "killer app" that makes good use of it. Up to then, it is a solution looking for a problem. If Alyx is "it" then momentum in VR will grow faster, and there will be more stuff you might care about. Sadly I'm not convinced it will do that. A few older gamers who like the HL franchise aren't going to do it, and will it be good enough to bring in a new generation? I'm not holding my breath. I doubt it'll do as much as Beat Saber in promoting VR gaming.

It won't. People are not willing to pay 300 bucks for better graphic card that can run all the games in the world and everyone expects them to pay minimum of 550 for one game. Killer game or not, this deal WON'T work. The cost to benefits ratio is garbage and people won't go down with this deal.

[xAcid9]

17 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

It won't. People are not willing to pay 300 bucks for better graphic card that can run all the games in the world and everyone expects them to pay minimum of 550 for one game. Killer game or not, this deal WON'T work. The cost to benefits ratio is garbage and people won't go down with this deal.

Whether you like it or not, VR sales is on steady climb. People buy this thing. 

[RejZoR]

Just now, xAcid9 said:

Whether you like it or not, VR sales is on steady climb. People buy this thing. 

I find that hard to believe when they can't give money for something that can be used for everything (better graphic cards) opposed to something that's almost twice as much and has ULTRA limited scope of use.

 

I've said million times, VR adoption would be far higher if it was plug and play with every game only as a headset used for better immersion (since you only see ingame content not room surroundings, even ignoring motion sickness issues that plague it in such cases), maybe with head tracking even if without controllers. But even as immersion goggles, it would sell more if you could play anything with it and as far as I know, that's not possible. Having them for smalls election of specifically made games for it is a terrible way of selling it. Which is why VR has flopped so many times through history and everyone can say how sales are climbing, it's a flop yet again. It just doesn't work, games selection is poor and investment to capability to use is absolutely terrible.

[TOMPPIX]

VR didn't take off because of the price, i would have bought one otherwise.