Ray tracing was already understood to be a gimmick of the RTX 2000 series GPUs that would take a few years to really catch on.
2023 if you believe this guy, but 2025 seems more likely. When there have been a few generations of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia with ray tracing acceleration, and consoles have been refreshed, it will become more common and will have been around long enough for some "good game" to really take advantage of it. Adoption will just naturally happen as it benefits game developers and the hardware accelerators will be in everything, even including phones.
what advantages tho? looking slightly better in areas no one notices unless pointed out while requiring several magnitudes more processing power? most consumers have no advantage from raytracing, that's why it's a meme mainly driven by marketing to sell new hardware because NEXT BEST THING IN GRAPHICS TECH (while the idea being literally centuries old).
it's like pushing for more polygons in models "so they look more realistic and stuff", completely ignoring the diminishing returns or point.
The strange thing is that the Valve Index have frequently shown up on the Steam Top 10 bestseller charts for quite some time, Facebook is still trucking along with Oculus, Sony is making a PSVR successor(unless that was fake news) so people are buying the damn things. No one seems to really be talking about the games though and that's weird. It can't all be porn, can it?
With some exceptions a lot of games seems to be the VR equivalent of mobile games. Maybe people scoff at the idea of paying more than $9.99/14.99 for a game to use on their $1000 headpiece running on an even more expensive PC.
Maybe the hypothetical push for "metaverse" crap will do something. In Facebooks scenario lots of people will be sitting on VR helmets at home because they do virtual meetings with them, why wouldn't the father let the kids mess around with it after dinner, it would be similar to how kids played PC games on dads work computer in the late 80's early 90's and that really built up a future market.
Some interesting things have happened, RE4 can be played with free movement and those that I've seen play it doesn't seem to have an issue with it. When they said that the problem with VR is that the player can't move like in a standard FPS or they will get sick my immediate thought was that people were pussies and it would pass and that seems to have started happening. I played a Quake 1 port in VR a couple of years ago and that fucker is fast and jarring but I never felt sick.
When people played/streamed early games on the Oculus DK2 a lot of them had the familiar FPS movement and it didn't seem like much of a problem.
My point with the last paragraph is that the 'do not's probably hampered game development and some are fading away. I think that it is possible to do some truly wild shit in VR, things that is not possible on conventional game platforms, but the current wisdom is "oh no, don't do that people will feel uncomfortable, making a shooting gallery instead".
software is another chicken/egg problem, while it sells it doesn't sell enough to warrant AAA development, since there are no "killer apps", there's no reason for normie joe casual to buy into it. vr is the hardware version of native linux ports.
some other factors are stuff like side effects, it might have worked for you but the big issue for now is still that it works for everyone differently. it's a hard sell to have normie joe casual give it a spin only for him to puke his guts out and be out of commission for 2+ hours due to nausea. "you just need to get used to it" doesn't help much when some people simply can't (similar to some people still get motion sickness from a pancake screen).
it's still not old enough that all the kinks have been figured out, it's finally technically possible to use to a satisfying degree while not costing several paychecks, so now people can move on to figure the next hurdles. not only had devs to try to diminish said effects, there were no best practices or common formula established yet. if you go back 15-20 years most games feel janky with weird input schemes, sometimes completely different per game, while these days everything will be exactly like you'd expect it to be - which in turn makes it easy for normie joe casual to pick up and get into it fast.
and least of all you still need a use case. while VR is great, it's still too much of a hassle and expensive to be attractive to the mainstream. most genres simply don't work or need more technical advancement, while the ones where it works are more niche, thus limited to a niche crowd, leading to the chicken/egg problem from the beginning (not to mention the increased costs since you're a literally in the game where you can directly eyeball every texture and model). for example take the most popular games right now - how would they work in vr? why would you even want it in vr when it's much easier/cheaper/comfortable to use it the way it works right now? most people simply have no reason to dip into VR besides the occasional gimmick or playing it at a friend's house. so ok, let's try something new to replace them, how and what could you do with current tech? which would also require expertise and ability to innovate which simply doesn't exist much anymore in the modern video games industry (and indies don't have the money for it, hence the mobile tier length and simple games).
as for metaverse, it's a nice idea, problem is again what's the point and the devil is in the details. why would I want to sit in a virtual conference, concert or whatever when you're the virtual equivalent of a lego figure because there is no tech to properly capture all your gestures and more importantly mimics to give a proper virtual representation of yourself? good luck selling that to companies when the beancounter asks "why not use microsoft teams for that?". for now it's the zoomer version of playstation home (BUT IN 3D THIS TIME!), and will be for a long while because outside deep dive tech (which works completely different and has it's own literal mountain ranges of issues to figure out - like who in his right mind would give facebook access to his brain or even optic nerve? how would you research it without turning loads of human guinea pigs into vegetables in the process?) even miniaturization and increase in performance won't solve the fundamental issues.
