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I work in the entertainment industry for a very large company that also produces games. We've had the money, time, and interest to pursue VR. The truth is you're correct. Storytellers are having a really hard time figuring it out. One of the biggest challenges is headset fatigue, which limits the length of story. In conversations with one of the VR manufacturers, they admitted it's one of their biggest problems behind motion sickness.

About 14 million VR headsets have been sold worldwide. That puts it about on par with the NES in the late 80s. I choose to forgive the VR market for not immediately being as successful as the mature gaming market. A lot of things were being done in the early 90s that showed just how little we really understood digital entertainment. It'll take tech improvement and product experimentation combined to really get VR to come into its own. That'll take continued investment on every front. We won't get there by magic.

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Just to humor my curiosity: According to the Wikipedia article, the NES sold 62 million units worldwide in total.

Yeah, you have to dig a little, because the NES wasn't discontinued until 1995. If you dig into wikipedia you can see quotes that put units sold in the range I quoted in the late 80s.

In 80s vs 90s?

I'm unsure how comparing sales of hardware vs a few years sales of a console 30 years ago is of any use whatsoever!

Because VR headsets have been selling for ~5 years.

Comparing them with the full lifecycle of the NES sales instead of its first 5 years is not a proper comparison.

I'd go further than that - VR headsets have only been properly selling for about two years at this point. The Oculus Rift didn't officially launch a consumer version until mid-2016, as did the HTC Vive, which launched around the same time. While Oculus headsets have been available in some form for five years, everything before the 2016 launch were prototype development-kit versions that came with a big asterisk on the order page saying they weren't meant for general consumer use.

Lots of enthusiasts did buy the Oculus DK1 and DK2 Rifts, but CV1 was the first time it was actually available in stores and marketed as being ready for consumer use.

Why compare them to NES sales at all?

If headset fatigue & motion sickness were non-issues, what would you make?

I could answer, but I don't know how important it is. At the pitch level, this question isn't really the issue. People have been dreaming of VR pitches for decades...partly why the possibility of real VR has captured the imagination of so many people.

At a more tactical level, such as beats, storyboarding, and even UX research...there's still a lot of experimentation when it comes to what works and what doesn't for storytellers. If you tell an experienced director to make an action movie, there's a lot of well understood techniques they can lean on to tell good story. So far, our experiences show that a lot of that flies out the window with VR unless you spend all your energy trying to encourage your user to frame the shot the same way a director wants you to. However, if you do that, you aren't really using VR anymore.

The problems that constrain story length are really a problem because you can only give story so much depth in 15 minutes...and if you don't have the opportunity to figure out how to tell a story with nuance, you won't learn how to get nuance right. VR has no nuance at the moment.

You're last sentence where you mention 'magic' made me laugh. Nice one, I agree, there will be no 'magic leap' forward so-to-speak, however things are progressing nicely.

The indie game scene on Steam VR is thriving and these experiments in vr experiences will yield future content and entertainment breakthroughs. The groundwork, at least, has finally begun.