Most of the people already know what virtual reality is and how virtual reality is used. As I have personally played a virtual reality game with the Oculus Rift, I would like to share my experience and provide some information.

First of all, virtual reality sounds cool and entertaining. At the same time, to engage in maximum experience, you need to be standing and moving during the game. This partly removes the relaxing part of playing a game, which is a disadvantage for some people. However, for most of the people this would be the reason to play a virtual reality game, which was exactly the reason I wanted to try the Oculus Rift. My first impression was that the idea of being in the actual game looks very weird because when you look down to your hands with the Oculus Rift on, you see your ‘virtual hands’. In my case, my hands looked like I had ‘fireball hands’. To make it even stranger, the first time you look around in the game, you get confused. Usually, when you turn to your left or right you expect to look away from the game you are playing. With the Oculus Rift on, you do not have the option to look away or chill for a minute. Instead, you have to take off your Oculus Rift. Nevertheless, I never would have thought that a game could be that realistic.

With the Oculus Rift, you get also two controllers in your hands. This makes it more like a console game, but when playing the game, you get used to it very easily. Once you are familiar with the controls, the real game starts. Whenever some object is thrown to you, you get the tendency to jump away or to move. Hence, this means that you need a big enough ‘playground’ to play in virtual reality. This is at the same time also a disadvantage of virtual reality. To maximize the experience, a large playground is needed to move freely. Especially when playing with the Oculus Rift on, you lose control over the external environment, which means that you are isolated within the game and forget that you only have limited space. However, this isolation provides you the optimal gaming experience as every sound sounds realistic and every movement you make is translated into the game. More importantly, when you try to throw a fireball, you actually have make the movements with your hands, which is far more dynamic than just pressing a button on your (PlayStation/Xbox) console. Briefly described, the Oculus Rift provides you an environment in which you are actually absorbed and totally focused on playing. It allows you to forget your ‘real environment’ and provides a dynamic and active gaming experience.

Nonetheless, this gaming experience comes at a high price. To use the maximum capacity of the Oculus Rift, you also need to have the controllers, which are sold separately. In addition, a high-end PC is needed to run the games fluently. These two factors partly explain why the virtual reality gaming business is not successful at the moment. Although the concept is promising, the needed investments are too high. For example, Best Buy had to close several stores which provided Oculus Rift demos because the requests for these demos declined and only a few headsets were sold. Personally, I can see why the sales are low. Not only do you need the headset and controllers, but you also need to buy a high-end PC that is able to run the games fluently. Therefore, the popularity of virtual reality gaming will increase after the prices of both the PCs and the Oculus Rift decrease.

All with all, the gaming experience of Oculus Rift is outstanding. However, with the outstanding experience there is also an outstanding price associated. Additionally, the way of gaming changes from passive gaming to active gaming. As a result, the relaxing element of gaming becomes more like a fitness exercise. My question to you is, considering that the relaxing element is removed from gaming, and ignoring high investment costs, would you play virtual reality games? Remember, it is not relaxing anymore, but it means playing games is being physically active.

References:

https://live.oculus.com/bestbuy/search

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14550488/best-buy-oculus-rift-vr-demo-station-closure

Billions of people use it everyday, applications on their smartphone. We have got many different kind of applications on our smartphone, for every kind of situation. However, it has not always been that every kind of application could be downloaded and placed on our mobile devices. In this blog we will focus on of of the most widely used platform businesses: the smartphone application market.

This market is a platform business, which brings together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges (Van Alstyne, Parker & Choudary, 2016). Their chief assets are information and interactions, which together are also the source of the value they create and their competitive advantage. The introduction of mobile app stores, such as the Apple store and Google Play store disrupted the smartphone industry (Merithew, 2009), which will be elaborated on in this blog.

Before the introduction of mobile app stores in 2008, mobile phones came with standard apps and software, which were incorporated into the smartphone. The cell carriers allowed a limited number of companies to develop apps and software for their mobile phones. In terms of openness of the market, cell carriers controlled the market and kept it relatively closed. The bargaining power of consumers was relatively low to medium with respect to the choice of apps on their smartphone, since they had little choice of app supplier. In contrast, these suppliers had relatively high bargaining power to choose what kind of apps they would allow on their smartphone.

Everything changed when mobile app stores became available in 2008. The introduction of the Apple App Store is an excellent example of how Apple became a Pipeline, by selling handset’s, and a Platform, by providing an app store that would connect developers and end-users, at the same time. Due to the introduction of mobile app stores, a two-sided market, connecting developers and consumers, was born. The smartphone market got disrupted due to the removal of intermediate companies that incorporated smartphone apps into their phones. Developers were able to connect to consumers, whereby value was created for both sides (Ranger, 2015). When both groups increased in number, more value was created, as it argued by network effects.

New business models emerged, whereby new strategies had to be implemented. The freemium strategy was applied to the smartphone app market and smartphones were not only mobile phones anymore, but became more like personal computers. What actually happened is that the mobile app stores did not only affect the smartphone industry, but almost every retail and business industry. Companies could make mobile apps to reach customers, which were initially bounded by geographical limitations. With the mobile app store, geographical boundaries were removed and collected into one single platform.

If we look in the future of the smartphone application market, we see some threats and opportunities. Allowing devices to run apps without directly downloading them forms a threat to mobile app stores. As downloading is time consuming, and with limited data plans also costly, the usage of HTML5 might be desired by consumers. HTML5 offers a clean start for developers, making it easier to connect to customers by avoiding the large amount of apps available in the app stores. As the mobile gaming market is expected to grow to 81 billion dollars in 2020, the introduction of HTML5 for games will be the future.

References

Eisenman, T., Parker, G., & Van Alstyne, M. (2008). Opening Platforms: How, When and Why? Harvard: Havard Business School.

Merithew, J. (2009). Top 7 Disruptions of the Year. Retrieved on September 27th, 2017, van Wired: https://www.wired.com/2009/12/top-7-disruptions-of-the-year/

Ranger, S. (2015). iOS versus Android. Apple App Store versus Google Play: Here comes the next battle in the app wars. Retrieved on October 10th, 2017, van ZDnet: http://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-versus-android-apple-app-store-versus-google-play-here-comes-the-next-battle-in-the-app-wars/

Van Alstyne, M., Parker, G., & Choudary, S. (2016). Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy. Harvard Business Review.