Earlier this week I took on the herculean task of listing every VR game currently discounted in the exhaustive Steam Summer Sale. I had assumed it would be a quick and simple job; Steam sales are massive but VR is so fresh that there surely couldn’t be many developers putting their products up at discounts.
Oh how wrong I was.
The breaking point was about two hours into the eye-gougingly tedious task of filing a game’s name, price, discount and URL. I paused for a moment, rubbed my eyes half from fatigue and half from disbelief, and then dared to scroll down. I was only about two thirds of that way through. It was at this point I let out a sigh of surrender, shook my weary head, threw my hands up in anguish and proclaimed to the world/my office: “There are already way too many VR games.”
“But Jamie,” you say, pulling your headset off of your eyes, its imprint now permanently lining your face from how long you’ve been inside “that’s a great problem to have!”
In some ways I don’t disagree with you. For starters, it’s a much better situation than the reverse in which our throats grow coarse as we thirst for precious few drops of VR content for our expensive headsets. There’s something new to see practically every time you log into Steam, a brand new opportunity pull you out of this world and take you to some place new, a place where you might be an elite warrior or famous explorer. Just the thought of it is enough to make me want to head back in and discover new portals to leap through.
Allow me to be selfish for a moment, however. I want to talk about the coverage both myself and the rest of the UploadVR team want to provide for you. I’m not going to cite the usual, worrying challenges this presents to developers trying to make a mark (and a buck), I want to focus on a part of the journalist’s job that I’m sure we all wish we could be doing better.
It wasn’t that long ago that sites like ours that focused on the wider gaming industry would be able to review pretty much every release on console. VR, however, has jumped straight into the PC ecosystem of there being simply too much content to even attempt to do that.
In fact, the Rift and Vive were the first platform launches I’ve ever seen in which no publication, let alone ours, was able to entirely cover. Rift launched with 30 games, and many of us only had time to fit the 10 or so highest profile experiences into 1,000 word wrap ups. The Vive, meanwhile, arrived with even more content and has seen releases on an almost daily basis ever since. Even PlayStation VR is going to get 50 titles in the two and a half months between release and the end of the year. It’s been impossible to keep up from day one, and that’s never going to change.
That’s hugely disappointing to me. As an expert, I want to be able to offer you my opinion on every VR game going. I want to be intimately familiar with every developer currently toiling away with a headset, and have unbeatable knowledge about what’s coming up next week and what you need to keep an eye on.
Perhaps more importantly, I want to tell you what you need to avoid. Not because I’m a heartless critic that enjoys ripping people’s work apart, but because it’s my responsibility to you to get you to save your money instead of spending it fully in the knowledge that you may just be trying something out for five minutes before realising it’s a turd.
Take a look at our reviews section. So far this month we’ve put out four of them. By my count, there have been well over 50 new games across Steam and Oculus Home this month, and there’s still a week to go. Let me assure you, we’re not being lazy; I worked until late into Thursday night to bring you that Steam Sale list, there’s been plenty of news and, oh yes, E3. It’s just an unavoidable fact that we don’t have even near enough time or resources to provide in-depth coverage of every VR piece released. Even the weekly roundups we produce are time-consuming.
We also have to cover stuff we know you’re going to care about, which means most of the time we’re reviewing stuff we pretty much already know is going to be good. Our review scores so far are largely around the 7 – 8 mark, with just one 3 (VR Tennis Online) being the only time we’ve dipped below a 5. Let me tell you, there are plenty of games on Steam and Oculus Home that deserve those low scores, but we can’t prioritise telling you to avoid them.
It’s not a new problem; the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have both gone a similar way after breaking down the barriers for self-publishing, and other Steam games seemingly pour in by the truck load. Most gamers abandoned hope of playing and seeing everything long ago, but with VR in its current state it’s critical that we help you pick the right experiences that show what the tech can do. We have to be custodians of quality and make sure you’re spending your time and money on more Lucky’s Tales than ill-fated experiments.
It’s a problem without an answer other than hiring much more staff and spending even more on freelancing, neither of which would likely make much financial sense. That’s especially true now that many of us seek out opinions on games via YouTube discussions (which would require at least one other person to also spend their time on the same game).
Maybe you don’t even care, and that’s fine. Maybe you’re happy with the amount of reviews we do, maybe you wouldn’t even click on the review in which I tell you the latest on-rails shooter for Gear VR isn’t worth the dollar. In my opinion we still offer you great content: the latest news, top notch exclusives, and in-depth articles. I’d just love to be able to tell you more about every VR game out there, but we’re already swimming against the tide here and we don’t want to drown.
