With $250 million invested in VR content and another $250 million to come, Oculus wants you to know it is helping developers get VR experiences made. HTC, meanwhile, has been a little less direct, but its plans are no less exciting.
The company hasn’t announced any enormous amounts of money being invested in VR games and experiences outside of initiatives like its $100 million Vive X accelerator, which funds a range of VR services. But VP of VR Content Joel Breton recently told UploadVR that it is working with “more than 30 teams” to bring content to the Vive and other platforms. These aren’t just games but a variety of apps across different genres, many of which haven’t yet been seen in VR.
When asked for further detail, Breton explained that these teams consist of a mix of “AAA” studios, “very well established developers”, and “the new class” of VR developers that have grown alongside the tech.
“So we’re not trying to discriminate against any of those brands we think there could be great things that come out of each of those,” he said. “But certainly I want to take a mixed view of the market and not leave anybody out. We love one-man teams in Kansas working by themselves.”
Breton declined to name any of these studios, though did assure that “hardly any of them” had been revealed so far. He stated that “we’ve just been kind of going under the radar a bit until we get some stuff ready to launch and as soon as it’s ready to launch we’re going to start announcing that we will likely have games hitting almost on a weekly basis pretty soon.”
How is HTC assisting these developers? According to Breton, the company might help studios get to “the next level” of “production quality”, which may involve helping with art or animation. He also used some examples of games that HTC already helped fund for the launch of Vive, like Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator (Review: 8/10), WEVR’s Transport, and content from Steel Wool Studios, which HTC recently invested $5 million in.
We could only speculate as to which developers are on that list. Certainly Bethesda, with its VR adaptations of Doom and Fallout 4, are good candidates, but Breton left us guessing. All the same, it is reassuring to see HTC tease content of this scale in the works.
