Autonomous viewers can be a sales boost, something that could lead the company to rethink its decision to abandon the development of immersive titles.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of PC Games, he said in an interview with Destructoid that the reason that led them last year to stop the development of virtual reality games was the low user base that there was at that time. “We expected the RV to be two or three times larger than it was. You can’t build a business with that, ” he explains. Despite this, the company already showed its optimism for the future of the medium, something that in the short term, as it claims, can be driven by Quest, the new autonomous Oculus device that will arrive on the market in the spring of 2019.
However, Pétursson points out that it is not only necessary to assess sales, but also the number of active users, and that in the case of a growth, then they would analyze the situation again. “If it takes off, and I mean if it does, we will reevaluate it. The important thing is that we need to see the metrics for active VR users. A lot of people bought viewers just to test them. How many of these people are still active? We found that in relation to our data, many users were not, ” he says.
In May 2017 (a year after EVE: Valkyrie was released and before Sparc), the company began to contemplate that they could not continue betting on immersive games, which led them to restructure the team in October of that same year. In early 2018, Sumo Digital acquired the team responsible for Valkyrie, which was located in the CCP office in Newcastle ,UK.
With no regrets for what happened, Pétursson continues to have long-term faith in VR.
