When SteamVR promised a week full of new releases, they weren’t kidding. An exhaustive number of games hit the HTC Vive over the past five days, more than anyone would have time to dive into and see all of. There’s some really good stuff, too; The Brookhaven Experiment, Fruit Ninja VR, and ViveSpray all seem like winners. But there’s also a lot of games that feel like they’re just here to stick a flag in the ground.
The VR gold rush was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before people realized the potential of the tech and just how massive it was going to be. A swarm of developers would follow suit, trying to get their foot in the virtual door. Surprisingly, though, this is happening before there’s even really a market to capitalize off of.
If you take a look at recent releases, you’ll largely see what I mean by concentrating mainly on the games that have ‘VR’ in the title. Granted that’s not all of them, but over the past week we’ve had DrumKit VR, ChessVR, The Slingshot VR, Ghost Train VR, and The Wire Loop Game VR. Brilliantly, we’ve even had VR Ping Pong and Table Tennis VR, with the major difference between the two seemingly being the placement of those two all-important letters.
Now I’m not saying any of these games are bad (some definitely are bad, though), I’m just commenting on the wealth of ‘This Everyday Game/Activity in VR’ experiences we’re getting. That’s to be expected of course, but some of these games feel like they’re being rushed out to simply get to market first. ChessVR, for example, doesn’t have multiplayer and, despite being a Vive game, doesn’t even let you pick up the pieces and move them for yourself. That’s pretty slim for a game that isn’t even listed as Early Access. But, hey, it’s the first Vive game to focus exclusively on chess so it gets to call itself that. That’s gotta be worth something, right?
Well, no, not really. Maybe ChessVR would be more of a hit if you didn’t rush it out; maybe if it had true multiplayer support and proper VR implementation, allowing you to become part of the world rather than just immersing you in it, it would be worth more coverage from sites like ours and the attention of fans. As it stands, I just recommended you go and buy the excellent Tabletop Simulator instead; it does all of that with a ton of other games to play too.
Admittedly there is competition to worry about, as this week’s two table tennis games prove. Both developers are probably kicking themselves for not going live a week earlier at the moment, but maybe that’s a good thing for us. Both games are in Early Access and now the developers are really going to have to work to prove that they’re the one you should be rooting for. If they both truly want to succeed and believe in their products, then we should have a fierce battle for domination, which means a better game for us.
That’s only if both developers really want it, though.
It’s a very different type of gold rush to what we saw on the mobile market. There we had imitation of others in the hope of being noticed and becoming one of the lucky few free-to-play apps that made countless millions. After Flappy Birds came the flood of imitators, and Candy Crush clones still go live on the app store. Here, developers are quickly putting out imitations of real life in the hope of… maybe making some money back?
That is to say this spree of rushed games is flooding in without there being a market to actually justify it yet. VR right now belongs to a group of enthusiasts and believers that want well-made content, not the legions of people that bought a Wii and brought in a generation of shovel ware. There will of course come a time when the far more casual audience starts to catch on, but that’s years away and by that point these games are going to be a distant memory.
If you want your VR game to endure and make money faster then you have to appeal to the audience it has now. This is a savvy group of enthusiasts that aren’t browsing Steam to find a quick fix; they’re on the hunt for genuinely striking and immersive VR games that are well thought out and properly developed. That’s why you see Battle Dome growing a cult following for its unique approach to VR multiplayer, and why Tilt Brush continues to astonish with impressive works of art.
If you’re not prepared to go the extra mile right now, then there’s not much point going anywhere at all.
