You might not have heard of Rabbit Mountain, but anyone with a Google Cardboard might well have played their first title, Jurassic VR since it’s one of the most downloaded Cardboard VR apps thus far.
This month, the Netherlands-based game developer announced that it had officially passed the three million download milestone. Jurassic VR, for those unaware, is a free first-person app in which you can walk around a small environment discovering dinosaurs in VR. It’s hardly the most advanced VR experience out there but it delivers the simple thrills of looking at the long-extinct beasts in 3D. That’s apparently enough to have grabbed enough people’s attention.
In an email, the developer’s Mick Brown told me that Jurassic VR had passed the three million milestone in around a year. He attributed its success to the project’s accessibility (it doesn’t require any control input), the popularity of its subject matter, and, of course, a bit of luck. It’s also important to point out that the game’s most recent update added non-VR support.
But here’s the real question: has Jurassic VR made any money? According to Brown, it’s done “quite good,” especially since Rabbit Mountain brought in the help of Immersv, a mobile VR ad network that seeks to drive revenue for developers creating free experiences. In fact the developer is so confident in the model that it’s going to use it again in its next game, a VR horror experience that’s also on its way to Cardboard. Upload has the teaser trailer below. It doesn’t have a name yet but it is expected to be released later this year.
Rabbit Mountain is partnering with app developer Zariba to create the new game. It’s an episodic thriller that will feature much deeper mechanics than Jurassic VR with puzzles that challenge players to escape a series of rooms.
Jurassic VR‘s news is another surprising and welcome success story for VR, which many predicted wouldn’t be profitable for some time yet. Last week we reported that Survios, the developers of Raw Data, and The Gallery creator Cloudhead Games, had both made more than $1 million from their respective releases, while we also know that Oculus and Samsung’s Gear VR has seen over a million users in the course of a month.
