Nope. It is not a gimmick and will definitely be a "thing" in the foreseeable future. So we have different ideas of the foreseeable future, interesting.
Nobody is going to play games that make them sick. Ever. It will not happen. This is not a solved problem, and VR will never be anything but a niche technology until you can walk in a video game without needing to throw up.
Oh for sure. And there are clearly great games that can fully utilize VR, such as beat saber. But obviously VR lends itself best to a first person experience (though maybe that doesn't need to be the case) and the best examples of these games (Doom for instance) are not full experiences in VR.
There are people who are made motion sick by modern FPSs, and the FPS market has absolutely exploded in our lifetimes.
I think we'd need to see hard numbers to estimate that (and the hard numbers would need to factor in that this generation of hardware---the Rift and later---is much higher-fidelity and responsive than its predecessors and tends to trigger less nausea).
Motion sickness is an exaggerated problem in my own experience. Your body adapts, and it kind of just goes away. I never had it with Onward, but the first few times I played Pavlov, and did some quick turns there were times I felt weird. That went away very shortly.
"This is not a solved problem, and VR will never be anything but a niche technology"
Wow, that is a very pessimistic approach to a problem. What are you even trying to suggest here, that we have a problem right now in this new tech, and no one will ever, ever ever, solve it because... you think so? People are solving way harder problems out there than this. Like going to Mars for example. I'm pretty sure we will solve motion sickness in VR.
I'm merely curious, as when 3D movies came out a major complaint against them was that people got sick from watching them.
From my very thorough research (googling "3D movie sick", and looking at the dates; all from the period 2010-2015) this doesn't seem to be a big problem any more. Now this could of course also be because people have just accepted that it is not for them, the people who get sick don't talk about it any more, or people in general have just moved on from 3D, but it does make me wonder. Could the motion sickness not also just be a temporary thing for VR?
The people who get sick from them don't go to them anymore. That's why it was "temporary". Kids finding out they get sick from 3D don't post about it on the same social media adults use.
But in terms of viability, it is also a matter of degrees: do more than half of your users feel sick after using your product, or only very small percentage?
