The state of PCVR from a dev's perspective
Just wanted to chime in on the topic of the stagnating PCVR market and lack of games from a dev perspective.
https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualrea...e_state_of_pcvr_no_growth_in_players_anymore/
We all know why AAA studios aren't investing in VR game dev, so pumping out PCVR games is still up to indie solo devs/studios with limited budget/manpower.But, truth be told, developing for PCVR has become unnecessarily tedious in the past few years:
- You have to support several different, often outdated and hard-to-get headsets and vastly different controllers (OG Vive, Rift S, Rift CV1, Quest 1-2, Index, Reverb G2, OG WMRs, Pimax, Vive Cosmos, that obscure headset nobody heard of etc.). If you miss any of those, expect angry negative reviews.
- You have to make sure VD works flawlessly, otherwise expect angry negative reviews.
- You have to optimize for an insane amount of hardware and make sure your stuff works on every possible combination of PC parts.
- You have to deal with a much more toxic review culture and a "slightly" less welcoming community than on other platforms.
- You also have to financially endure Steam's sale culture where most ppl don't even look at games unless it's on a 30%+ sale.
All of the above is 100% manageable, but when you go into leveraging the work required and profit in return and mix that with the general lack of OEM activity/support in the PCVR space, suddenly developing for Quest/Pico or PSVR(2) becomes a lot more appealing, hence why most devs are focusing on those platforms, with PCVR being an afterthought (if it is considered at all).Not to mention the peer pressure from an ever-starving PCVR community.
As
u/DOOManiac put it under my original comment on the topic:
Imagine you’re a small one to three person, development studio, and for your PC game you have to test 10 different mice, and make software changes for edge cases on each one.Also, the mice cost $500-$1000 each.
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All of the above creates such an unwelcoming and rough dev environment that it legit scares off aspiring, or even well-established developers from even thinking about releasing a game on Steam.I personally don't expect this to change anytime soon - AAAs will stay away for a few more years if not more, indies will continue making standalone games with a graphically enhanced PCVR version on the side while OG VR peeps have to make do with F2VR mods, racing/flying sims and VRChat.Gamedev is a business after all, and simply put the PCVR market is not profitable at its current state (
unless you're part of that 1% who strikes gold with a game concept).
edit:
P.S: although this is my personal take, it aligns with our studio's experiences (we're the ones behind Zero Caliber, A-Tech Cybernetic and Gambit!)