It was last year that CCP Games announced that they would be shuttering their development efforts on virtual reality (VR) titles and shutting down two studios in the process. At the recent Fanfest 2018 event, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson talked about the events last year and why they are no longer making VR titles.
It was during the fanfest that Pétursson took to the stage and talk to fans about the state of CCP Games, addressing the elephant in the room of the companies four available VR videogames. He assured that they would continue to get support for the time being and, speaking afterward in an interview with PCGamer, talked further about the companies stance on VR.
“I’m a big believer in the future of VR still, nothing really changes that,” Pétursson explains. “It’s just going to take a longer time to get off the ground in terms of install base. We were always estimating the journey to be quite slow, but it’s just going to take longer than makes sense for us to continue for now.”
This is, regardless of the companies enthusiasm, what lead to the decision to end development of VR titles and close the two studios as mentioned above. Even though VR headsets continue to sell globally and become more widely adopted, Pétursson explained that that still is not enough to see a ideal user base.
“The install base is not at a level that a company our size, and the type of games that we want to make, can be done based solely on consumer revenue. It can be done, but you have to be a [top-selling] game every time. It’s extremely risky right now to do any game of size and scale.”
Pétursson goes on to mentioned that the gap in the market is being filled by a number of indie developers though who are picking up the place of the big-budget developers that are not developing VR titles. “Where you can have success that makes sense is at the indie level. A small team can definitely have a break in VR. But we’re just not an indie [company], I mean, we’re an independent company, but we have hundreds of people.” Pétursson explains.
Though CCP Games continue to have great success with their massively multiplayer online (MMO) EVE Online, the company is sticking to its guns on the topic of VR for the foreseeable future. All is not lost though as Sumo Digital acquired the EVE: Valkyrie developer CCP Games Newcastle at the start of this year which may see a future for the title and/or VR titles based on CCP Games titles. For now though, no details have come to light.
VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on CCP Games and their VR titles.