I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.
I just got done writing a long thread on the history of 3D as a novelty: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970
But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs.
I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
Part of the problem the industry has with VR is unrealistic measures of success.
Does VR really have to be used with the same frequency we use consoles and have sales as high as smart phones to be considered not a novelty?
There's a huge gap between "another duffer like 3D TV" and "the new iPhone"
Look at movies as an example. When sound came along, it basically destroyed the market for silent film. Same deal for color film. But 3D has come and gone at least twice, bumping along as a novelty in between.
I think it's going to be even more true of VR, in that doing good VR content is a) difficult, and b) a pretty different process than most non-VR content. One of the VR fans in this thread was bemoaning the lack of AAA VR content in particular. But nobody's going to be making that content unless the market is large enough to support it.
Even if it's arty or niche content (which is fine by me) VR fills a unique role and people will want to keep experimenting with it.
Between education, arts, B2B, training etc the gaming side of VR could disappear entirely and there would still be enough usage to maintain an ecosystem. It doesn't take a huge company to design and make the hardware.
Maybe VR going underground for another decade wouldn't be such a bad thing. The tech industry might be slightly less unicorn-obsessed next time round.