The release date for the follow-up to Job Simulator shifted out of 2018 and into 2019, an update today from development studio Owlchemy Labs confirms.
Vacation Simulator is a larger follow on to Owlchemy’s groundbreaking game Job Simulator created for the 2016 launch of the HTC Vive. Job Simulator has since launched on pretty much all VR headsets that offer robust 6DoF hand controllers. Last year the company was purchased by Google while continuing work on a follow up title. Up until this week Vacation Simulator’s web site gave 2018 as an expected release window, but a blog post today explaining the avatar system in the game also confirmed the title’s new launch window is sometime in 2019. The date on Vacation Simulator’s main website was also changed from 2018 to 2019.
“The world of Vacation Simulator is shaping up to be an incredible one unlike any we’ve created before,” Studio Director Autumn Taylor wrote in an email. “We’re confident fans will love what we have in store, and that it will be well worth the wait!”
Owlchemy CEO Devin Reimer and his team did foundational work with Job Simulator that is highly reusable across other products. That work appears to be continuing with Vacation Simulator, with the company developing a mobile spectator view for the game that would be a pretty amazing feature if Google integrated it as a larger part of its stack of VR tools given to developers for the Daydream operating system. Notably, Google recently announced its own controller tracking technology that could be pretty compelling in a standalone VR headset.
