Category: Hilmar Veigar Pétursson

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CCP CEO Says Current VR Falls Short Of Expectations

Over a year ago, CCP announced it was stopping work on virtual reality (VR) titles, shocking many in the VR and videogame sectors. CCP Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has now revealed some of the reasoning behind the decision.

CCP had some of the earliest successes in VR, with EVE: Valkyrie spinning off from the hugely popular MMO EVE: Online and receiving critical praise as well as a loyal fanbase in its own right. However, last October CCP announced it was closing its Atlanta studio and selling off the Newcastle studio that produced EVE: Valkyrie.

EVE Valkyrie - Carrier Assault

Speaking with Destructoid, Pétursson said that the main reason for the decision was that the user base for VR had not attained the size they studio had hoped for, making it difficult to justify further investment in the sector.

“We expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period,” Pétursson said. “You can’t build a business on that.” Pétursson went on to explain that the decisions regarding this began to be made around May 2017, less than six months before the studios were closed and sold.

“Was it a surprise? Maybe,” he said. “But the picture was filling in that there would not be a way to continue with VR as heavily as we were.” Pétursson said there were no regrets about working on VR, and suggested that he had positive expectations for the Oculus Quest headset and what effect that might have on the wider VR market.

“If it does take off – and I mean if – we’ll reassess,” he said. “The important thing is we need to see the metrics for active users of VR. A lot of people bought headsets just to try it out. How many of those people are active? We found that in terms of our data, a lot of users weren’t.”

For future coverage on new developments in VR, keep checking back with VRFocus.

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CCP Games CEO: “We expected VR to be two to three times as big”

CCP Games, the Icelandic studio known for their long-running MMO Eve: Online (2003), shuttered their VR production studios in a surprise move last year, selling off their Newcastle-based branch behind their multiplayer space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016), and completely shutting down their Atlanta studio behind sports game Sparc (2017). Now, CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson speaks out in an interview with Destructoid about the studio’s reconsolidation back to traditional desktop gaming, and his thoughts about the VR landscape. In short, he thought VR would be bigger by now, and more capable of supporting a healthy multiplayer userbase.

EVE: Valkyrie, the company’s flagship VR game, was the result of over three years of development before becoming a day-one launch title on Oculus Rift and PSVR, arriving shortly afterwards on HTC Vive via Steam in 2016—a seemingly best-case scenario for any multiplayer-only game.

Image courtesy CCP Games

Under CCP direction, EVE: Valkyrie saw a number of updates designed to entice players back, including new ships, maps, and weekly events; CCP even pushed a major update to the game last year that brought support for desktop and console players, a move to help boost sales and revive the ailing VR-only playerbase. Still, the multiplayer game just didn’t perform as CCP ultimately expected, and the company officially stepped back from VR shortly thereafter.

“We expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period,” Pétursson tells Destructoid. “You can’t build a business on that.”

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Pétursson still has hope though that headsets like Oculus Quest, the $400 high-end standalone 6DOF headset launching in Spring 2019, will have the mass appeal to bring the user numbers the company needs to see before jumping back into VR.

“If it does take off, and I mean if, we’ll re-assess. The important thing is we need to see the metrics for active users of VR,” he tells Destructoid. “A lot of people bought headsets just to try it out. How many of those people are active? We found that in terms of our data, a lot of users weren’t.”

Image courtesy CCP Games

While CCP Games has been recently acquired by Korea-based developer Pearl Abyss, the studio behind the MMO Black Desert Online, it may still have leeway to begin anew in VR when they think the time is right. According to Pearl Abyss, CCP will “continue to operate independently as a developer with studios in Reykjavik, London and Shanghai, while integrating the company’s extensive development and publishing expertise into Pearl Abyss’ operations for all current and future projects.”

Despite shuttering the Atlanta-based office behind Sparc and selling EVE: Valkyrie to Sumo Digital, both games remain functional today.

The post CCP Games CEO: “We expected VR to be two to three times as big” appeared first on Road to VR.

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CCP Games to Earn Back the $30 Million Invested in VR By the End of the Year, According to CEO

One of the more popular and intricate games at the moment for both the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR is CCP Games’s EVE: Valkyrie, and the studio has a few other titles dedicated to virtual reality (VR), but there may still be a feeling of surprise when it was reported that CCP Games had said the studio is close to breaking even on the money it has spent on VR investment, something not many studios can say.

We have all heard that the VR market will result in millions, if not billions, but it really hits home when a single studio claims to be closing in on profiting $30 million as a result of just VR videogames. This all unraveled during the keynote given during DICE Europe this week, according to Games Industry.

EVE Valkyrie - Carrier Assault

“We were fortunate enough to have some early success, so we have added a bit of investment into the field,” said Hilmar Petursson, CEO of CCP Games. “So I think we’re now, by the end of this year, we’ll have invested $30 million into virtual reality games. And we’re just about seeing a path to break even… We’ll probably hit it in a few months, so we’re extremely proud of that.”

All of this is thanks to its releases of EVE: Valkyrie on Oculus Rift, and Gunjack on Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive, as well as the close partnerships with the major platform holders. “We got tremendous help from the platform holders to be in that position,” Petursson said. “It’s a combination of starting early, and working with all the platform holders – we’ve been fortunate to work with close to all of them, so that got us to a place where we were able to invest so much, and bring so much product to market.”

Moving onwards from this position, CCP Games will be focusing on PC development, and 30% of the company to work on VR. We can only imagine how much they will earn in profit once the titles launch on Google’s Daydream and PlayStation VR, not to mention forthcoming VR developments.

For more on the latest developments from CCP Games, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.