‘Not a very good thing to do’
The annual DICE Summit is taking place in Las Vegas right now, which means that video game executives from all over the world are gathered together to talk shop. These are the industry’s most influential decision-makers, and you best believe that whenever a technology is as emergent as virtual reality has been, it’s going to be a major topic of discussion.
One such conversation between Oculus head of content Jason Rubin and Insomniac Games’ CEO Ted Price took place in front of a live audience. As detailed by GamesIndustry International, the two went back and forth about virtual reality and the disparity between what the market expected and what it produced. No one’s denying that VR didn’t exactly set the world on fire in its first year.
Rubin has some thoughts about what VR needs to do better. The three big ones are: The devices need to be more comfortable, less heavy, and have a better lenses; the games need to come up in quality; and the price needs to come down. There’s a lot of balancing to be done because a lot of these needs are directly conflicting. VR has some stuff to figure out.
But, Rubin gave a piece of frank advice for developers who are inclined to bet big on VR: Don’t. Not yet anyway. Rubin said “Anytime a dev goes out of business, that’s a bad thing for the industry. Going all-in on VR right now, unless you have a good business plan, is not a very good thing to do.”
If you’re interested in the business side of games, their conversation is worth reading. It’s not every day that we get to see a major developer ask a platform-holder how it’s going to make things better for them. The short of it is that, for the time being at least, developers still need to act cautiously. VR hasn’t yet proven itself as a platform that is entirely dependable.
Oculus: Going all-in on VR not a good plan for most devs [GamesIndustry International]
