Just decided to do my yearly check in to see if there was any chance the devs changed their minds about adding VR support. But it seems the toxic VR community has soured them once and for all.
Before they were talking about possibly adding it in 2022. But Alas, feelings were hurt. This might even prevent Rocketfish from ever supporting VR even if it hurts them out of spite.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is , we all love VR and want it at all costs but keep it civil. Or we may never get Star Citizen or Odyssey (i still have hope)
Well, it’s probably about time to close this topic for good. First off, thank you to everyone in this thread who has listened to us as we’ve been saying that we don’t want to create a VR experience for EVERSPACE 2. We understand that you are all passionate about VR as a whole, but we are not going to spend time and resources creating this for EVERSPACE 2.
Without going too much into technical/design details or debating business cases (we’ve shared our reasoning in-depth in an earlier comment about why we don’t plan to support VR in ES2), we’ve come to the conclusion that we would not be able to match high expectations of all VR players while justify spending our limited resources on a complex feature that is relevant to less than 5% of our target audience.
FWIW, the final nail in the coffin for VR in ES2 is this thread. Disrespectful comments from VR players calling our team lazy, technically incompetent—mind you this is to a veteran team that has been working their butts off to deliver best-in-class space combat games on all kinds of gaming platforms—and/or greedy because we allegedly “mislead” VR players that we’ll add VR to ES2 (a never-promised feature). Even if there are VR players who only bought the first EVERSPACE because of VR support, that does not mean it is a guaranteed feature in the sequel. Frankly, many of the comments here show a level of entitlement that is off-putting to a team that really does find VR an exciting platform, and two studio founders willing to invest a six-digit budget in VR out of their own pockets.
Our PR folks are probably pulling their hair out right now—I’ve been called out for poor communication to VR users before, but I genuinely don’t care anymore—if any gruntled VR user is still reading, ask yourself WHY in the world should any indie developer get excited about putting their house on the line to make significant changes to their game to support a heavily fragmented platform for a single-digit percentage audience? This is especially difficult when the feature asked for is led by a vocal minority with utterly unrealistic expectations as if the title was designed as a VR-only game, and frequently shows a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to properly implement VR, also often paired with outright false perceptions of how the gaming business works.
On a personal level, the audacity of some hardcore VR fans calling me out for being patronizing while I genuinely wanted to openly share our reasoning about our business decision which was based on deep market research and our own internal data at the beginning of this thread—arguably quite rare in the gaming industry—was just the beginning. Meanwhile, we’re at a tipping point: the bridges are burned, and I couldn’t genuinely care less about any business consequences due to not supporting VR in ES2. Even if the business decision might hurt my own pocket as is claimed throughout this thread, at this point, I am more concerned about protecting our team from toxic community feedback than delivering the next big VR title.
/Michael
PS: This post has passed our PR police, so this is no joke!
Uh-oh. Michael has responded quite thin-skinned there - I actually knew him, we went to school together and played Squash a lot. But after school days the ways parted, so I will spare me to contact him out of the blue to convince him of the value of VR. And business-wise he surely will have done his math, he is certainly aware of the difficulty to balance investment and results: he and Christian started off with 3D visualisation services for architects, but I believe they weren’t getting enough traction, and then years later I would suddenly see them pop up in the mobile gaming sector; eventually they had to drop the upfront fee model in favour of free-of-charge access (but then of course other types of monetization, e.g. paid DLC’S etc.) - he commented that move at the time as being a painful, but commercially utterly necessary move to survive b/c the mobile & online community just were so spoiled to expect everything being offered to them for free (at first, that is).
So navigating through the treacherous waters of what is commercial game development is certainly something he is familiar with, and very aware of. So I am very much inclined to believe the arguments he is bringing forward, and in addition am convinced that he privately will be fascinated by VR tech as this is exactly down his alley of all things 3D and visualising non-existant worlds.
Sad that it turned out this way - but indeed a tale of caution for all of us to remain fair and reasonable in our expectations, and communication. First of all, adding VR (or e.g. wide-FoV support) may be a priority for us, but rarely is for the devs. Not because they don’t love it (that may or may not be the case), but simply because it doesn’t earn them that much in extra-revenues. Unless it’s a Skyrim, ported with rather modest ambitions. Still for me the result was great and I wished more companies would take their existing great games and would hire a team to port them to VR in such a modest approach. We need more VR content; quality will increase over time when the user base & dev experience increases. But feeding those today who invested into VR hardware is important too.
It is sad. But better for them to work on an everspace sequel from the ground up with VR support vs patch working it in.
Though understandable for shutting down to zealot minded ppl. However the Dev of Fantastic Contraption once told a dismissive naive user on Steam when that user made ludicrous claims that there was no profit in developing for linux. The Dev told him it would be dumb to ignore 3% growth in profits at the time.
That Steam user has since changed his steam user name and made it private. but is still named in a quote.
His reasoning is interesting. The calculations seem to assume they would receive essentially an equal marketshare to non-vr software titles or just steam software in general. He says essentially that 95% of their customers would not participate and a highly motivated 5% occupy a high percentage of the discussion.
VR users have a much higher annual attach rate and less compelling titles mean Everspace 2 would probably have received a very outsized percentage of new business. HL-Alyx was certainly profitable for Valve as it’s a must-have title. Must have titles are actually achievable in VR whereas for standard Steam titles achieving must have status is a near impossibility.
Around 300k+ new customers per month are flowing into the VR marketplace and their attach rate is through the roof.
He also mentions they would need to put up their houses and put up personal funds for the VR development (or presumably whatever their next development task is). That is indeed saddening but there were other options such as monetizing the VR capability. I think they could have made a reasonable argument for $10-$15 extra as a DLC and used early access for that to generate capital AND gauge the actual level of demand.
5% of your userbase with 25% of new business + a surcharge would probably have been an example of a profitable model for them. Wouldn’t be particularly risky because they would have some vision into the level of income during the development process.
There are solid reasons investment capital is flowing back into VR entities again. Even apple and google are jumping back into the mix. Facebook (Meta) is on a buying spree. TikTok bought Pico VR and the list goes on. The combination of hardware capabilities and a decent sized existing userbase makes development far less risky than it once was.
We are completely open to discuss assisting them and looking into promoting the latest VR software. In this case they seem quite disillusioned by the passionate advocacy their VR community exhibited in looking for VR support.
I think there are a lot of avenues that can be explored that can create highly profitable environments’ for top game titles to thrive well in excess of their marketshare.
Have no pony in this race at all and wasn’t even aware of the issue, but on the face of it:
This post smacks of bean counter mentality based off of old, out of date statistics on the number of VR users and adopters, a personal bias against VR and a very poor business model. Yeah, people are going to complain and man do we get a lot of entitled little sh*ts in VR, but if you’re going to base your business decisions off of personal reactions to internet haters you’re not going to be in business long.
Grow up and grow a pair.
See also: Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Your post does indeed have merit. However unless Everspace DeVs monitor posts here. It simply adds to choir here.
I think in part they simply may have Developer block. Everspace VR was okay but in my xp had to run Oculus mode to be playable. The Steam native was a mess. So in all likelihood they need experienced vr programmer to help them make a really decent vr game. Either way it is ashame “fans” bullied them and the DeVs narrow mindedness.
I was wrong thinking such software had no place in the future of vr, and native vr will be all we needed, I was so wrong, I didn’t anticipate that native vr contents would be so few and lack of AAA titles would still be an issue dragging on till today.
Vorpx is actually my #1 non-regretable purchase of vr to date. And it would only get better with better hmd.
And the dev of vorpx is amazing, keeps on adding value to his software over the years.
We still see a variety of DeVs reluctant to utilize hardware to the fullest. Just look at multicore cpus for example. It is getting better but has taken a very long time.
You’re right. They lack competence and willingness to learn, it’s the simple truth. If one of them there would learn and implement with that stack for a while, their future projects would benefit as well.
Well, I wish your enthusiasm would translate into money for the companies. But apparently it doesn’t which is why we see content being an issue and if you don’t have a Zucker daddy (you as a German will appreciate this pun…) subsidizing your VR game then it is a risky business decision.
We can blame the developers collectively to be ignorant, lazy, even stupid. But they do the actual math, they see the earnings Vr generated for their last product with VR support, or at least will likely connect with others having released VR ports - I for my part am not sure that I have a much better understanding of their business case than they do.
Update. The devs can make all of the excuses in the world as to why it makes no sense for them to sink money into adding VR support but there really is a simple solution to this and its all the community really needs.
Apparently the greatest game Ive never heard of until today and resulted in an instabuy. Deep Rock Galactic received a rather interesting update today.
Why on earth this team of arseholes dont just open up the possibility of adding VR to the community is beyond me and would cost them nothing to do. (That is unless they are lying and plan to add VR support themselves down the line and want all the $$ that would bring which apparently is nothing because nobody would pay for that
Whats even crazier is that for a game like everspace we dont even need hands or anything like that all we need is a damned vr view and maybe a fixed hud.
A VR modder could probably do this in a week.
Its also equally disgusting that ED:Odyssey has no VR support for on foot which makes no sense at all.
but is still named in a quote.
