[X]True Magic
Honestly, being the one guy in a death game who can respawn sounds interesting.
Seriously, writing that "bought" a NerveGear thing shit is weird, and I didn't know how to handle it. How can people afford to play this damn game when the equipment itself would probably cost thousands? The estimate I put out there was a very charitable guess of what the price could have been.
Eh, whatever. The entire purpose of fiction is to sweep stuff like this under the rug.
It's possible that the nervegear also has utilitarian purposes in addition to being a gaming system / peripheral.
For example:
Theater mode - Put on the nervegear and enter a virtual movie theater that lets you watch TV, play video games, surf the net, etc using a massive sized screen. You wouldn't need a monitor or TV if the nervegear can emulate one.
Computer aided design - If the nervegear can access your thoughts, it could be great at making art. Go into a virtual studio and summon up musical instruments, art supplies, have the machine read your thoughts on exactly how you want a particular piece to go, etc.
Surf while you sleep - Since the nervegear requires your body to be inactive, it makes sense that time on the device counts as time asleep and the whole VR experience is (from a neurological standpoint) just a very organized dream.
So basically, you can put in a days work, come home tired, plop on your nervegear, go to sleep, spent eight hours more or less surfing the net in VR or playing games or whatever, and then wake up fully refreshed with clear memories of all the computer stuff you did. It's basically a sleep aid and ensures your late night surfing doesn't hurt your sleep schedule. Early to bed and early to rise and all that.
Time dilation - Dreams run at a different rate than reality, perhaps the nervegear has a similar deal where time runs faster in VR than the outside world. So you can simply get more work or play done using a nervegear than a different device.
VR vacation - Allow the user to experience taste or smell in addition to sound and sight. You could have a VR restaurant where you can eat fancy foods, go to the beach, swim underwater, porn. Basically by the time the developers had the code to include all the environments, cooking systems, and other stuff into their game, they could have released a whole bunch of sensory mini-games that would be fun on their own.
In essence, a nervegear could be incredibly useful for things outside of gaming and that makes it into an actual investment and not just for games.
If your $2,000 investment gives you access to a full sensory VR environment where you can essentially go to the movies, binge watch your streaming services, eat lobster thermador, write that novel you wanted, visit incredible vacation destinations that might not even exist in real life, and do all this in the time you're normally asleep... well suddenly the bang for your buck isn't looking half bad.
So yeah. In short, owning a nervegear would be a lot like owning your own holodeck you can do stuff in while your body gets sleep. At the very least, it can replace the need for a computer monitor or big screen TV for one person. Also, if the full sensory interface can boost your work productivity, it could potentially pay for itself.