'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO (roadtovr.com)

CCP Games, the Icelandic studio known for their long-running MMO Eve: Online (2003), shuttered their VR production studios in a surprise move last year, selling off their Newcastle-based branch behind their multiplayer space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016), and completely shutting down their Atlanta studio behind sports game Sparc (2017). Now, CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson speaks out in an interview with Destructoid about the studio's return to traditional desktop gaming, and his thoughts about the VR landscape. From a report: In short, he thought VR would be bigger by now, and more capable of supporting a healthy multiplayer userbase. EVE: Valkyrie, the company's flagship VR game, was the result of over three years of development before becoming a day-one launch title on Oculus Rift and PSVR, arriving shortly afterwards on HTC Vive via Steam in 2016 -- a seemingly best-case scenario for any multiplayer-only game.

Under CCP direction, EVE: Valkyrie saw a number of updates designed to entice players back, including new ships, maps, and weekly events; CCP even pushed a major update to the game last year that brought support for desktop and console players, a move to help boost sales and revive the ailing VR-only playerbase. Still, the multiplayer game just didn't perform as CCP ultimately expected, and the company officially stepped back from VR shortly thereafter. "We expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period," Petursson tells Destructoid. "You can't build a business on that."

Comments

Re:History repeats itself

[MBGMorden]

Yes, but admittedly it's always simply because the tech isn't good enough.

This time, admittedly, the tech was SIGNIFICANTLY better than in previous attempts, but it's still not to the point of true seamless immersion.

Unlike other techs, VR pretty much has to be more or less "perfect" or most people aren't interested. That makes developing it incrementally hard - you can't finance the next gen of it with profits from the current gen. Instead every few years we just have to try it again based on technological advancements made due to other segments of the industry and hope that everything has gotten good enough.

I'd say that whenever VR is finally perfected, it will be nothing short of amazing. That said, I don't think it's there yet. I don't even though the next attempt or two will be there yet. Maybe in 20-30 years.

Re:No VR for me

[Immerman]

There's an easy way to avoid the uncanny valley without enormous horsepower - just stay away from it. There's no need for realism in a fun game. Nintendo has embraced that aesthetic - Mario, Zelda, etc. make for fun, immersive games without any uncanny valley problems, and very little computational demand. It seems likely that consumer-level VR would be wise to embrace a similar aesthetic for the forseeable future - otherwise the target market is limited to people willing to spend an outrageous amount of money on a high-end gaming computer, plus a bunch more for the headset, etc. At a $2-3k entry price to desktop VR, I'm not at all surprised the market is currently very limited - that's well into the seriously hard-core gamer price point there. Fortunately there's the professional market to help drive the development of high-end stuff that will eventually trickle down. Engineering, medicine, etc.

As much as I dislike Facebook, I think the Oculus Quest is heading in the right direction to create a market for consumer VR - cheap and easy, with full immersion. It's not sunglasses, but so long as it's light enough to not be particularly uncomfortable - so what? You can't see them while playing, and opaque sunglasses aren't exactly going to make you look a whole lot "cooler".

And really, sitting on the settee misses much of the potential of VR - if you're going for full immersion, you want to actually move in and interact with the world, not just look around. Racing, flying, and other such "cockpit games" can work well by presenting a compelling scenario where you're just sitting is expected (especially if you have proper physical controls and are only using the headset for audio/visual immersion), but the real promise is in actually being in a virtual world. Plus, that lets you actually *move* while playing, which stimulates both health and endorphin production (a.k.a. pleasure) - something that the rise of digital entertainment has largely stripped from modern playing. There's a reason that the Wii was so popular - heck, I know lots of people that still have and use them, many who never bothered to upgrade because the only thing that's improved is the graphics, which are largely irrelevant to the fun. I still bowl, play golf, shoot pool, etc. that way on a semi-regular basis.

And, if they can work out the details to let a desktop PC drive the same cordless VR headset, then there'd an easy path for more serious enthusiasts to get more involved. Whether that means pushing many millions of pixels wirelessly, or utilizing the on-board processing power to apply zero overdraw, perspective correct texture fills to pre-transformed and pre-clipped geometry.

And then of course there's AR - now *that* I think will really shine once they make AR "sunglasses". But despite much technological overlap, that's targeting a *very* different experience.