My VR journey so far…
The Journey of a small VR game developer, so far.
It’s the mid 1980’s and I’m a teen: I have a computer in my room that I play with daily (started with a Sinclair ZX81, then an Amstrad CPC 464. Commodore 64?, check!, Amiga?, check!, early CGA games? check!…).
I play Ghosts’N’Gobelins, Barbarian (*Death Sword in the US), the Pawn, Defender of the Crown, etc. I’ve also learned to program in Basic and finished my first game ever: an off-shoot of the game “Zombie” from ubisoft… My friends like it.
It’s the mid 1990’s, and I’m a young adult: I’d love to make video games, but the industry is completely locked by big publishers: if you are not in bed with them, there’s no real way to mass distribute your products. There are a few cracks that start appearing (shareware distribution, CDroms in magazins) but it’s unreliable. I love to draw stuff and tell stories, but I also want to have a career – so I decide to go in Advertising, an “edgy” professional choice back then. Maybe I’ll become a movie director one day?
Pretty much the moment I graduate, rises that thing called the Internet that has the potential to completely change the dynamics of my future profession – After working a few years in classic advertising, I enroll in a completely new Master in Hypermedia (CD-Roms/Hypertext/web). I’m exposed to VR then (the early 1997, 98’s days…) and I’m amazed, but I see the technology die of asphyxiation in its craddle, as all the money gets divested towards web technologies.
It’s the early 2000’s, and I’m a young professional: I use Flash daily for work but realize I can also make games with it. I can also distribute them, because, well, internet… Let’s make a RPG then! 🙂
It comes out (Two Kingdoms, 2001) and meet a small success among the Flash game community. I keep pumping games (Sylvaniah, a Barbarian remake, Lost outpost, etc…). Some gather an impressive number of players (millions).
I’m making games, they meet their audience and I have a super fun job that pays the bills anyway – I’m ecstatic.
It’s 2015 and I made a big career change: I’m a fresh new professor: I teach game development, design, production etc. Loving it. I’m also getting exposed to the rebirth of VR (Oculus Rift) and MR (Microsoft Hololens). I’m blown away by this stuff and really hoping it’s here to stay!
It’s 2018 : Oculus just released the Oculus Go! A very well priced, very accessible, quite impressive to be honest, VR headset. I see the potential for mass adoption. I also feel that I’m uniquely positioned to finally revive my younger-self’s dream. I partner with a local coder, and 6 months later we put the VR shooter Theta Legion on the Go! store. for free.
It gathers some attention ( uploadVR link ) and generally very positive reviews but the download numbers are…honest? I’ve shipped Flash games that had infinitely bigger audience, but I understand the technology is still very niche – I’m interested.
A Year later, Theta Legion is brought to the Rift Store, as a larger game, for $9.99. The product is well received but the sales are absolutely underwhelming. Out of nowhere, Oculus released the Quest, that is getting all the traction and attention.
It’s 2021: My first Quest game is on the store! Stones of Harlath is a simple but fun RPG – people like it (some don’t) and the sales are thousand times better than on the Rift store. I’m happy!
I start working on my next project: I’ve learned a lot, I can push the graphics, and make a more ambitious game.
It’s 2022: there’s been talks about bringing Theta Legion on the Quest store, I decided that it needed to be a brand new game specifically designed for the platform. I’ve learned a lot about optimization shipping Stones of Harlath. In June, Shock Troops, a sci-fi VR shooter, ships on the store, for the Quest 2 (it actually is playable on the Quest 1, minus 2 missions that stretch the capacity of the aging headset).
Correct sales – comparatively, Stones of Harlath had a more explosive start, but the store also has an increased number of games, and the shooter genre is pretty well stocked. The reviews are good, the audience seems to connect with the retro vibe, and I know there’s a long tail of sales potential. I’m still very happy!
The next project needs to blow every of my other games out of the water. I’m sci-fi-tired so I return to the Fantasy genre and start working on Drakkenridge. Let’s make it happen!
It’s 2025, and a lot happened.
The game industry is reeling from tens-of-thousands layoffs and a significant contraction.
The Quest store, previously tightly regulated by Oculus (now Meta) has opened the valves. The store is inundated with thousands of games – some fun ones, and some that are barely prototypes. I read that devs releasing ambitious titles in that new context suffer a massive exposure deficit on the platform. That’s worrisome.
I’m knee-deep in developing Drakkenridge – Simeon (co-dev on Stones of Harlath) and I have been working tirelessly for 3 years making our “massive” RPG. We want to break the mold of the previous games that were fast productions delivering a fun experience, with a relatively short playtime (estimated at 5 hours for SoH and ST) but priced right ($9.99). We are hoping for 10+ hours of gameplay. 3 years is the most I spent working on a Garage Collective game. If we are hoping to pay our work, we need strong sales and solid store visibility. I’m worried.
AAA studios have come, and gone… In the past year I’ve witnessed some heavy-weights on the platform: bypassing Oculus Studio own games (that are funded as platform sellers) I’ve seen Assassin’s creed, Batman, Xenomorphs arrive on the store, with big production values and big marketing dollars. That has to be good for us too, right? It brings attention to the Quest as a respectable, legit gaming platform that even smaller indies can benefit from. Players will come for the big titles, and stay for the steady flow of smaller ones.
Right?
Per recent reports, it seems that none of these ambitious bets payed off as expected. Big publishers have dipped a toe and found the water too cold. Some studios are down-scaling, some are shutting down.
Players options are all over the place. PCVR is still breathing…barely, but it’s an option. Lots of mods, some solid AAA titles are keeping the systems alive but none of that is supported by hardware evolution: PCVR gamers are playing on tethered Quest mostly.
PSVR 1&2 were timid attempts by Sony – something must have gone wrong, because it fell far short of expectations. The latest iteration is however still alive, and is looking reinvigorated by the meandering strategy of Meta’s Quest. PSVR is a focused vision on gaming, based on some solid hardware. It’s still wired, though…
Aside the Hardware, software offering has also massively shifted for the players. Flat-to-VR mods revive old classics – awesome AAA games of old, made on budgets far exceeding what indies can afford – are readily accessible to players, some for free. Free-to-play, MTX-based games are the spotlight of the Quest store, due, apparently to a massive demographic shift of the audience…
Working with Meta so far has been the dream: the people are kind, passionate and competent – genuinely one of the best experience I can think of in this Industry.
The problem lies with the corporate vision: it seems to me like the focus keeps brutally shifting from one thing to the next, with very little forewarning. While it’s impressive that such a mammoth of a company can shift that quickly, it feels quite tumultuous as smaller studios trying to adjust their patterns to the moving giant.
So, what’s ahead? I have no idea.
We are finishing Drakkenridge. Aiming to be content complete at the end of the month… then QA, then the unknown.
For the first time in a looooong time, I don’t have a plan for after – if I put one together worth the time to execute, what’s to say that the priorities of the market won’t have shifted another time once that project comes to fruition?
At the end, Drakkenridge is all I dreamt of for Stones of Harlath, but didn’t allow us to explore because I wanted to time the market : after shipping a game on the Go when the Quest was all the rage, I learned my lesson 🙂
After the equally fast-tracked Shock Troops, we took the risk to invest time in a longer form adventure game, our “dream game” (minus a few cuts here and there) and we’ll most likely end up shipping in a market expecting short-form social experiences with a layer of monetization.
Seems that some lessons are never truly learnt 🙂