People just want the games they already love, in VR. That is the whole pitch. Not a new genre. Not a new audience Mark Zuckerberg invented in a delusional dream after a night of smoked meats and glasses of water. The same games. In a headset. With your hands.
The industry spent a decade telling us that is not what we want. They told us we want short sitting experiences. They told us we want original IP built for a mobile chip. They told us ports are a dead end and “VR-native” is the only honest path. Then a bunch of unpaid and underpaid people on Discord did the ports anyway, and the storefronts are still acting surprised that the catalog people actually boot is Half-Life, Witcher, Cyberpunk, Vice City, Morrowind, Max Payne, RE4, RE7, RE8, RE9, Forza Horizon 6, DOOM 2016, Hogwarts Legacy, Ready Or Not, the list goes on. And not the subsidized clone of the thing. THE THING.
PCVR mods are the proof. They eat a 5080 alive because they can. They were not designed around a strap-on phone SoC and a Quest store cut. That is why they feel like the games you already paid for, just finally in the medium that makes sense. High end hardware sitting on a desk for years while official VR kept shipping mobile-first because that is where the install base and the recurring store revenue live.
Standalone people are not a different species. Same request, different checkout. They want to open a store and buy Vice City VR, Max Payne VR, Morrowind VR with actual money. They will take a 6DOF classic over another indie that is “inspired by” the classic. If the platform will not sell that, someone will ship a build on GitHub or a $3 Patreon and the install still happens. That is not piracy-as-personality. That is demand finding a door that was left locked.
This is not on the consumer. Corporations are allowed to chase margin. They are not allowed to pretend the demand was imaginary after a weekend 6DOF implementation exists in public. “It costs too much” was the line for ten years. It gets thinner every time a modder wires room-scale and two-handed guns into a 20-year-old executable before Monday morning.
The industry is not in shambles because mods are rude. It is in shambles because the catalog people wanted was sitting in their Steam libraries the whole time, and the official answer was a different game, on a weaker chip, with a new title screen. Modders did not invent the appetite. They just stopped waiting for permission.
