Owlchemy Labs, the trailblazing developers of Job Simulator, today announced its VR game available for Rift, Vive, and PlayStation VR has officially cleared $3 million in sales, the largest figure we’ve heard to date for PC-based VR.
The Austin-based startup raised $5 million in August after developing a number of fundamental interaction technologies for its Vive-bundled launch title Job Simulator: the 2050 Archives. The game stopped being bundled with Vive purchases in August, selling straight to players instead at $30. When we asked for clarification on how exactly the $3 million number was calculated, Owlchemy Labs CEO Alex Schwartz told us it was “gross revenue before store cut” and “all of this revenue is from sales. Vive pack-in sales represent a very small portion of overall revenue to date.”
It also debuted on PlayStation VR and Oculus Touch with the release of those products late in the year, helping the company to cross the $3 million threshold. It was also the most downloaded PS VR game in all of 2016 on Sony’s online PSN Store. However, it’s unclear if it’s the most popular PS VR game overall, because this data doesn’t factor in physical game sales of boxed titles such as RIGS and Battlezone — Job Simulator does not have a boxed version.
Previously, we reported Survios’ Raw Data and Cloudhead’s The Gallery Episode 1 each cleared $1 million in sales. Like those titles, Owlchemy’s game is a showcase in room-scale VR design as it lets you playfully take the role of a cook, car mechanic, convenience store clerk, or office worker. Its “smaller human” mode for kids, as well as its humor and family-friendly atmosphere, set it up as an excellent first-time virtual experience for many people.
“Super exciting to see that VR content (if it has sufficient polish, quality design, etc) can do so well even in these early days!” said Schwartz in an email to UploadVR. “Very promising for VR, especially since we predict a number of ‘nay saying’ articles to come out in January about how ‘analysts were wrong!’ ‘VR didn’t sell enough units!’ Us who drank the Kool-Aid early know that a brand new medium takes time to get off the ground and these numbers are already very strong!”
Owlchemy is working to develop groudbreaking mixed reality software which could dramatically improve both the quality and ease of filming footage that seamlessly merges two realities, and the company is also expanding Job Simulator and developing a game for the popular animated series Rick and Morty.
While the $3 million figure is quite large, we can’t quite crown it as “the best selling VR title” yet, with games like Gunjack from CCP Games finding a home on roughly 1/10th of the 5 million Gear VRs sold so far, as well as the space shooter EVE: Valkyrie having been on the market just as long, also available on all three major platforms.
Update: This story has been updated for clarity regarding boxed vs. digital PS VR sales.
