WJA: There's already 1800 VR-compatible games on Steam, way more content than a console has at this stage of maturity. Yet somehow there's less than 2000 Steam users playing a VR title at the moment. Why?

PALMER LUCKEY:I think you mean "If it's inevitable, how come hardly any Vive/Oculus owners even use STEAM on a daily basis?" The answer is CONTENT!

WAGNER JAMES AU: If it's inevitable, how come hardly any Vive/Oculus owners even use them on a daily basis ?

Palmer Luckey and I had a really interesting conversation on his Facebook post announcing that it's "inevitable" VR will rule the future . Since Luckey is a pioneer of virtual reality's latest wave, I'm copying it below with some light edits. I think it shows that this belief in VR's dominance is non-falsifiable , i.e. an article of faith that can't be altered by contrary facts, but I'll leave that up to the reader:

Above: Number of VR compatible games and software currently on Steam

PL: There are 1800 VR "games" on Steam. Most are terrible. Engagement is driven by QUALITY, not QUANTITY. There are probably more people playing a single VR game right now (Lone Echo) than there are playing those bazillion tech demos combined. You keep trying to conflate low VR engagement on Steam with VR engagement in general, as if Steam usage is a good indicator of when and how people are using their VR rigs in general. That is stupid.

WJA: Superhot, for instance, is an awesome game. But in the last 24 hours, only 102 people TOTAL have played it for VR in Steam. Why? And if you reject Steam usage as a metric, which metric will you accept?

WJA: Superhot, for instance, is an awesome game. But in the last 24 hours, only 102 people TOTAL have played it for VR in Steam. Why? And if you reject Steam usage as a metric, which metric will you accept?

PL: Superhot came out last year, and most people bought/played it on the Oculus store, not Steam. It is indeed awesome, but was never intended to be a sticky game that brings people back day after day after day. The same factors are why millions of people continue to play games like Call of Duty and Destiny instead of Portal.

Mass use of VR is inevitable. Low engagement on Steam VR does not suggest otherwise. Heck, low engagement of VR in general does not suggest otherwise. Inevitability is determined by long term needs, not short term accomplishments. Man has never stepped on Mars, that does not mean there won't be millions living there someday. I am not saying there is another better metric you can point to. There is not. That does not mean you should take a badly flawed metric and use it to make baseless claims.

WJA: When you say, ”I am not saying there is another better metric you can point to. There is not,” I think that suggests the idea of VR's inevitability is non-falsifiable.

PL: We are talking about predictions based on data that currently exists, not a scientific hypothesis. VR usage data exists, you just don't have access to most of it yet.

Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis -- apparently there's good VR usage data that exists, we just can't see it yet. I could mention that there's several multiplayer games for VR on Steam similar to Call of Duty and Destiny, at least in terms of trying to create long term engagement, such as Raw Data (multiplayer combat) or Star Trek: Bridge Crew (multiplayer simulator based on the world's most well known sci-fi brand), and those aren't played much either. But at this point, what's the point pointing that out?

I don't mean to single out Luckey here, by the way, as other leaders in the VR industry say similar things, when challenged on their faith in virtual reality, until they're basically saying "VR will be big because I believe VR will be big." Thing is, at a certain point, the companies which have invested billions in that assertion will start refusing to take that as an adequate answer.

Oh yeah, speaking of the game Portal:

... on Steam, there are currently almost twice as many people playing Portal 2 (3,658), a PC game from 6 years ago, than are currently playing all the VR games and software on Steam combined -- at the moment, 1982 total.