This year’s GDC Europe event is right around the corner, running on 3rd and 4th August, and the annual survey that precedes the show has some interesting new stats about VR.
As reported by Gamasutra, over 800 European developers took part in this year’s survey, just under 20 percent of which said that they were working on VR headsets, with an even smaller slither noting they were working on AR headsets. In the VR-specific field a total of 23.1 percent of respondents said they were working on the Oculus Rift, making it the most popular VR platform in the survey. As you might expect, Valve and HTC’s Vive follows ever so slightly behind at 22 percent. Both platforms support the PC.
Sony’s PlayStation VR followed on at 11.8 percent, which isn’t too surprising considering it’s on console and not quite as open to develop for as PC, despite the strides the company has made in the past few years. Oculus and Samsung’s Gear VR follows just behind, as do Google Cardboard and Google Daydream respectively. Mixed and augmented reality headsets, HoloLens and CastAR, also take up a small percentage.
While Rift might be the most popular platform to develop on right now, later questions reveal that this could change in the future. 50 percent of people said they’d be interested in working with the Room-Scale device in the future while 34.1 percent said the same about Rift. 33.5 percent expressed interest in using PlayStation VR, while just 34.5 percent said they had no interesting in working on any VR platform.
That’s positive news, though there was a perceived dip in confidence in VR over last year’s survey. 71.7 percent of developers said they thought there would be a long-term sustainable market for VR last year, which fell to 68.8 percent this year. Could issues with shipping the headsets and other concerns have spurred this slump?
It’s not a dramatic dip, though, and the rest of the survey suggests good things for the future of VR. Next year’s results will be back up by a year of availability of both the Rift and Vive as well as the release of PlayStation VR. How will that affect the results?
