EVE: Valkyrie developer CCP Games has again spoken out about its withdrawal from the VR market.
CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson recently told Destructoid that the company had anticipated far bigger sales for headsets, saying: “we expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period.”
He continued, noting that CCP couldn’t “build a business” on the current install base, but that might change in the future. “If it does take off, and I mean if, we’ll re-assess,” he said. “The important thing is we need to see the metrics for active users of VR. A lot of people bought headsets just to try it out. How many of those people are active? We found that in terms of our data, a lot of users weren’t.”
We still don’t know how many units headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have moved, though we do know Sony’s PSVR recently passed three million sold. Pétursson’s comment about active users is an interesting one, though.
CCP was one of VR’s earliest and biggest supporters. EVE: Valkyrie, for example, was one of the first major games to enter development for VR, releasing alongside the Oculus Rift in 2016, and was considered a poster child for the platform. Games like Gunjack, Gunjack 2 and Sparc all followed. Almost a year ago to the day, however, the studio announced it was pulling out of VR, closing down its Atlanta-bassed studio and selling off the Valkyrie developers in Newcastle, UK to Sumo Digital.
Pétursson did also add that CCP has “no regrets” about working in VR and that he remains a “long-term believer” in the platform, but don’t expect CCP to play a big part in helping it get there anymore.
