With virtual reality headsets from Oculus, Valve, and Sony promised to finally hit the consumer market in just a few months, most of the largest video game publishers have still been slow to commit their resources and popular franchises to the promised VR revolution. At a recent conference presentation, Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen suggested that, for his company at least, the reluctance is in part due to the small expected size of the market for VR early adopters.

"There's some challenges still and I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market," Jorgensen said, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. "We don't make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough. The PS Vita—the Sony product—we don't make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it's all about the size of the market."

Jorgensen went on to say that EA has tried development kits from a number of VR manufacturers and that it will "build software for various ones." That said, as far as a larger commitment to VR development, "we'll really wait and see how big the market is going to be," he said.

In the longer term, Jorgensen said there will "certainly [be] a market" for VR games in "five-plus years." In the next one to three years, though, "you might see alternative uses for virtual reality first before it becomes gaming," he said.

Last summer, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars that his conservative goal is to sell just "north of a million units" over the lifetime of the first consumer version of the Rift headset, now due in the first quarter of 2016 . At the time, Iribe warned that first headset is probably "not going to be a console-scale market." It's the second-generation headset, coming a year or two later, that Iribe said he expects to "hopefully... get many millions of people into VR."

A year ago, Jorgensen said that EA was also concerned that early VR headsets and prototypes still hadn't completely solved the nausea problem for many users . "The challenge is if you are at all even slightly motion sick prone, it's very tough," he said. "I've seen people within 30 seconds have to take the goggles off because... it is so immersive," he said at the time. "It's an incredible experience and I think there's a huge opportunity, but there's some technology steps that have to be played out and I think some ways to make sure people enjoy it but don't get sick by it too quickly."

In contrast to EA, Ubisoft pledged significant VR support earlier this year, promising that a "number of games" would be ready for various headsets in the first half of 2016. The French publisher showed off demos of some of those VR projects at this summer's Gamescom show, an effort that Ars UK's Mark Walton said showed "impressive maturity." Ubisoft's enthusiasm for VR has proven to be the exception among the big-name game publishers so far, though. The reaction to virtual reality's potential from other major companies has ranged from silence to early skepticism.

Without a lot of early support from these big publishers, the new wave of VR headsets will likely need a breakout "killer app" from an indie or in-house developer to build up the sales momentum it needs to attract those larger publishers. Without that, or a lot of patience from the marketplace, the new wave of VR gaming might face a Wii U-style death spiral before it's even able to get off the ground.