I sure hope you’re not tired of CCP Games talking about VR because CCP can’t stop won’t stop.
The video game studio known best for EVE Online has been laser-focused on the VR space for the last few years now, launching Gunjack, Gunjack 2, and EVE Valkyrie for VR and just last month announcing VR sports sim Sparc.
Today, CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson features in a new interview on GamesIndustry.biz, where he basically talks up how well VR is doing. When interviewer James Brightman suggests that only about two million high-end VR devices have sold — numbers that the analysts at SuperData said made VR the “biggest loser” of the holiday gaming sales season — Pétursson argues that two million is actually a much bigger deal that it seems to be by putting the number into national perspective.
“That’s a lot of units! You can make a game for that. I’ve seen worse. We made EVE Online for modems – people are like, ‘Download the game over a modem?’ Maybe it’s small if you have some grand expectations of something bigger, but close to two million that’s a lot. […] I come from Iceland where the entirety of the population is 300,000. We’re talking at least triple that, so that’s a lot. I would call the installed base huge for an Icelander. It’s triple my home country. And people make all sorts of products for Icelanders. We have three TV stations in Icelandic for 300,000 people but we have a million VR players; that’s amazing.”
In 2015, CCP raised $30 million in venture capital specifically for VR development. In September of last year, Petursson told DICE Europe attendees (in what he called his “conservative outlook”) that his company was on track to “break even” in the VR field “in a few months” following the investment of that money. Since then, CCP has taken EVE Online free-to-play and announced its first non-EVE-based property, Sparc.
