During a conference call to discuss new releases in the ‘VR Funhouse‘ family of games, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA to revealed to UploadVR that the original VR experience has been downloaded on Steam over 100,000 times.
VR Funhouse is a collection of mini-games for the HTC Vive that center around a carnival theme. The games themselves are fun little excursions such as whack-a-mole or a shooting gallery, but the overall intention of these micro-experiences is to show off various NVIDIA rendering techniques designed to make VR more realistic.
VR Funhouse was released on Steam in mid-July and now, barely over a month-later, it has been downloaded over 100,000 times. This is a rare glimpse into the mysterious world of VR-related sales figures, something we don’t hear about all too often.
We still don’t know how many Oculus Rifts, HTC Vives, or Samsung Gear VR’s have been sold by their respective companies. The amount of software being purchased for these systems by their owners remains ambiguous as well.
100,000 downloads is certainly not a small number, but in the world of gaming it’s also not a ton. The recent mega-hit Pokemon GO, for example, was downloaded over 100 million times in less than a month, but it’s worth pointing out most modern smartphones easily support that game. Likewise, popular traditional gaming releases such as Grand Theft Auto easily sell millions of units in as little as a few weeks.
It’s also worth noting that VR Funhouse is a free experience which should mean that it has a lower degree of customer friction and can therefore be considered a fairly comprehensive example of what Vive developers can hope to generate in terms of consumer interest in their titles.
This download number can also be used to make a few decent assumptions about how many Vives there are in the wild as well.
NVIDIA today is also releasing five new mods for VR Funhouse on Steam. These include a 360 mode for the whack-a-mole mini-game and a tommy gun expansion for the shooting gallery.
The company will also be making a modkit available for download that contains a complete set of editing tools for VR Funhouse. This could be an interesting way for those interested in VR development to get a taste for it without having to build their own programs from scratch.
VR Funhouse, the new mods, and the modkit, are all available for free download on Steam today.
