There seems to be only two schools of thought when it comes to analysis of virtual reality. One is all sunshine and roses and predicts massive, probably overly optimistic, growth figures. The others are ‘the sky is falling’ types who seem to seize on anything negative in order to declare ‘VR is Dead’. It seems that HTC Vive are not overly happy with the latter group, and have taken to the Vive Blog to give them a good talking-to.

The blog post in particular references a report from Digital Trends which talks about VR sales figures from Amazon, and proceeds to point out a number of ways which the data presented could be misleading.

Several points made by HTC Vive are ones that have also been addressed by VRFocus, as seen in an article about the modern VR cycle, and some comments in the weekly VR vs. article.

HTC Vive were not pulling punches right from the very start, evening saying in the introduction: “Analyst reports are in and apparently, it’s curtains for Virtual Reality (VR). Pardon us if we’re not heeding the alarms. News of the so-called death of VR comes once a year and is greatly exaggerated.”

From there, the blog post proceeds in a point-by-point fashion, discussing how early consumer VR was largely driven by smartphone-based devices such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Not only have these devices been superseded by standalone units like the Oculus Go, which offer a better visual experience, but the promotional offers which were available for phone launches have now long since passed.

HTC Vive also point out that PC-based VR companies are yet to release any solid sales figures, and that much of the growth of premium VR has been centered around location-based VR centres, something which the Digital Trends report did not address.

The full blog post covers a great deal more ground, and can of course be read in full from the HTC Vive official site. As usual, VRFocus will continue to cover new developments in the VR industry.