Don’t hold your breath for a new VR game from the makers of EVE: Valkyrie any time soon.
At the beginning of the year developer CCP Newcastle was sold off to UK-based Sumo Digital after the wider CCP company withdrew from the VR market due to the low install base of headsets. At the time, Sumo told UploadVR that Newcastle’s experience in VR was a “great addition” for the company. Now, though, Managing Director Paul Porter says that “constraining” the team to VR would be “wrong”.
“They’ve brought some great in-depth knowledge of VR to Sumo immediately, but that doesn’t mean we’ve acquired them as a team to do VR,” Porter recently told GamesIndustry.biz. “They’ve got so much talent that constraining them to VR would be the wrong thing to do.”
Porter didn’t outright deny that the team was still working on VR, though did say that it was currently developing “active projects” that weren’t ready to be announced, so it’s possible the studio is working on something in VR alongside more traditional games. Currently, the wider Sumo Digital is working on Crackdown 3 for Xbox One, though it’s unclear if the Newcastle team is contributing in any way.
It would definitely be a shame to see the Newcastle team exit VR fully. As the developers of EVE: Valkyrie, the studio pioneered early VR development, becoming one of the first teams to launch a game on the Oculus Rift in 2016.
