He posted up this giant thread in the VIVE reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comme...out_virtual_reality_development/?compact=true
Highlights:
Highlights:
- RocketWerkz (the studio) made a game called Out of Ammo, which he says is one of the better selling VR games and is well above the studio's expectations.
- However, he notes that this has actually been incredibly unprofitable for studio and even adding features like drop-in co-op, while resulting in a sales bump, failed to increase sales long term and just made the game even more unprofitable.
- He says this was the result the studio expected given the market, and that they only made VR games because they had the money to cover the losses (and presumably wanted to try out the medium).
- The reason he's sharing this is that he's very upset that people on the reddit are attacking developers who take VR exclusivity agreements, because he says that's the only way most of those developers can actually afford to make VR games due to how small sales are.
- RocketWerkz itself did not take an exclusivity agreement. That had considered one, but it would only cover part of their budget vs. sales deficit.
- Dean Hall notes that neither he himself nor anyone he has talked to has ever gotten something from the purported Valve VR funding pool, so that this isn't a realistic option for most developers.
- He notes that, after their second VR game which is about to come out (it was originally going to be DLC for the first game, but got rather large), he's actually not interested in making another VR game as basically everyone on RocketWerks' VR team no longer wants to work on VR games. He said he's also heard this privately from several other VR developers, but that this is something no one seems publicly willing to mention at the moment. It's worth noting there's a lot of venture capital money for VR products right now, so if we take him as telling the truth, a lot of them might want to keep the door open if they can't find work on something else.
- He ends making another plea to the community to stop harassing developers on twitter and elsewhere over exclusivity agreements, because if they successfully convince developers to stop doing them, it's most likely to just result in them not making VR games since they can't afford to.
- He's also answering a bunch of questions people have in the thread and intends to do so again when it's morning in New Zealand.