Virtual reality has had several waves of expectation, each ending with the same conclusion: a committed audience, good games, and no breakout into the mainstream. The current hardware is the best yet and the conclusion has not changed.
What VR does well
Presence. Being somewhere rather than looking at it. For horror, for atmosphere, for spatial puzzles, for anything where the sense of place is the point, nothing else comes close.
Physical interaction. Games that use your body – rhythm, fitness, throwing, climbing – work in a way they cannot on a screen.
Why it stays niche
Friction. Putting on a headset, clearing space, charging controllers, dealing with the cable or the battery. Every session has a setup cost that a console does not.
Isolation. You cannot play with someone in the room, cannot glance at a phone, cannot half-watch something else.
Duration. Most people cannot comfortably play for the hours a screen game gets, because of weight, heat and motion effects.
And content economics. A small audience means small budgets, which means few large productions, which keeps the audience small.
What would change it
Hardware light enough to forget. That is the constraint everything else follows from, and it is a physics problem rather than a design one.
The reasonable view
A genre with its own strengths, its own audience, and its own best games. Worth trying for what it does uniquely. Not the future of all gaming, and it never was.