VR developers: Stop shipping glitchy, half-baked games

On the 1-10 spectrum of “game developers should be able to sell completely broken demos” to “every game should be thoroughly vetted before release to earn the Nintendo seal of quality,” I’m somewhere in the middle. For years, I’ve hated how app stores and “games as a service” have cultivated a perpetually-in-beta culture for software, but as long as a game’s labeled Early Access or otherwise specifically disclaimed as unfinished, I can grudgingly accept that most games aren’t “finished” when they ship… except for titles that arrive without necessary features, such as Street Fighter V.

VR games are different. When a VR game breaks, the entire immersive experience can collapse, leaving you stuck inside a mess. Over the past two weeks, I’ve played “finished” games (most notably Killing Floor: Incursion and Ark Park) where objects become visually jittery to the point of inducing nausea, controls stop responding properly, and levels lock up, requiring a hard reset. These sorts of problems won’t surprise long-time VR users, but they can be show-stoppers for VR newcomers and demo players considering their first dip into this immersive tech. As Wipeout Omega Collection and Beat Saber have recently demonstrated, polished games can win even skeptical people over to VR as a platform. Unfinished, unpolished games can literally scare people away from VR forever.