The Tragic Downfall of the Video Game Console (opens in new tab)

I believe John Carmack has said that this is one of the major barriers to VR adoption.

The fact that the Meta Quest has to spend long amounts of time to update after being on the shelf for a while.

This is a barrier because it prohibits people from grabbing their Meta Quest from the closet to show people who are visiting or coming over. It also makes the owner of the device less likely to pull it out of the closet to use it for personal use because of the frustration.

For what it's worth, I don't recall the Nintendo Switch ever giving me such trouble. Creating local accounts and playing offline has been smooth for me. But I never tried Minecraft on it.

OMG yes! This inability to just turn it on and be reliably playing a game in less than 30 seconds is the major reason I haven't upgraded to the current generation of consoles. It's especially bad for those of us who get busy with other things and may not boot the console up for weeks or even a month or two. Then it's almost certain I'll get hit with a mandatory OS upgrade and then a game upgrade. And then there's the drag of glacial install speeds, the need to create and manage user accounts, constant DLC pitches - it's become the opposite of fun.

In response, we've gone all in on retro gaming and it's a blast. The games are great and we get to spend >99% of our play time... playing.