With four VR games already under its belt, its onward and upward for UK-based nDreams, which today announced significant investment.
The studio, which has released titles on virtually every major headset thus far, raised £2 million (around $2.49 million) in the first of a two-stage round. Half of that money comes from Mercia Technologies PLC, which has previously invested £4.1 million in the studio. The rest comes from other angel investors. CEO Patrick O’Luanaigh told UploadVR that the funds would be used to “grow the team” and “increase the quality” of its projects.
When I last spoke with O’Luanaigh back in May, he told me that the company was planning to break even on its projects by the end of this financial year. Today, he said that the studio was still hoping to do this, and that some of its releases had already been profitable. He also noted that the studio has another launch “pre-Christmas”. It’s not currently known what this title could be, though the only other major hardware launch left for the year is the release of Oculus Touch on December 6th.
nDreams’ biggest VR release to date is first-person adventure game, The Assembly [Review: 7/10], which released on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive systems earlier this year before coming to PlayStation VR in October. O’Luanaigh declined to reveal sales figures for the game, but did state that nDreams was “pleased” with its performance, noting that PS VR sales “have been good.” The company plans to release a new update for the game by the end of the year.
When asked if nDreams had another title on the scale of The Assembly in development right now O’Luanaigh replied: “We have lots of projects in different stages of development – some mobile, some high-end VR.”
Seeing as how nDreams’ previous release was as recent as last week — the developer launched third-person puzzler, Danger Goat [Review: 6/10], on Daydream View — they show no signs of slowing down production any time soon.
