Xbox doesn’t want to enter the VR market just yet

In stark contrast to Sony’s PlayStation, which has already introduced two successive generations of VR devices, Microsoft’s Xbox appears to hold less fervor for this domain. Whether it’s the Xbox One or the Xbox Series X|S, they each maintain the guise of a rather conventional gaming console. Recently, according to a report by VG247, Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, addressed this topic during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Matt Booty articulated that, from Xbox’s perspective, they need to anticipate the arrival of a larger cohort of players in the VR segment. Xbox currently boasts numerous prominent game IPs, each accompanied by an immensely vast player community. Thus far, Xbox has ten games with more than 10 million players each, yet for AR and VR, they are far from reaching such a scale.

In 2019, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, addressed this issue during an interview with Stevivor. He contended that the majority of users who seek a VR experience can experiment with it on a PC or elsewhere. Furthermore, Spencer posited that gaming is a shared experience, whereas VR is solitary, and confined to individual gameplay.

“I have some issues with VR — it’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience. We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR,” Phil Spencer added at the time.

Taken together with Matt Booty’s recent interview, it is evident that AR and VR have yet to be considered focal points for Xbox. However, at last year’s Meta Connect conference, Microsoft did announce its plans to integrate Xbox’s cloud gaming service into devices such as Meta Quest 2. Although, this is more akin to the browser on Meta Quest 2, essentially a virtual giant screen.