Agree or Disagree: VR will be a bigger market in retail locations than the home

Let's have a debate...

So we're going back to arcades?!

I bet people occasionally said the same thing about video games in the late 70s; and, in fact, for quite a while, arcades were "the thing": but, now?... the idea of an arcade is almost more of an item of nostalgia. Sure: while VR is expensive and content is limited and peoples' living areas are still designed around heavy couches pointed at media centers, the "VR Arcade" at your local retail location is going to be a big deal (and I am even thinking of setting one up at my office, not for any hope of a profit, but to get more opportunities with users to hone VR use cases; I am located in a dense college town and while doing some demos with a Vive people have actually already asked me about setting up a location they could rent), but in the long term (and the real question here is not "if" but "when", as "long term" might only be a couple years: I doubt there will be a similar twenty year lag as we saw with early video games) people are going to have cheap, portable, quality VR experiences at home; and, if VR is ever actually popular, over time the notion of a living/family room will transition to have the property of "is easily cleared to allow for room-scale VR". (I mean, for a trivial example of this happening: DDR was one of the final things that kept old-school arcades alive, but portable DDR mats and later the Kinect combined with increasing general interest in this class of game, and now the big market for this is at home, not at retail locations, even despite that being able to play the game with random interested strangers whom you later got to know in real life would have seemed to me to be a major drawing point :/. Many of my friends now have their couches and televisions set up with enough room to let them play dancing games or team music games, which would have sounded way too involved before these games became popular, the equipment cheaper, and the concepts simpler.)

What do you mean retail locations? Do you mean stores or do you mean VR theater/arcade type services?

I suspect it's cheaper to tighten the thresholds then to pay for multiple retail outlets.