Facebook’s Oculus is betting big on

the future of virtual reality games

By San Jose Mercury News, adapted by Newsela staff on 08.15.17
Word Count 806
Level 1040L

Oculus has announced that "MARVEL Powers United VR," a multi-player game that allows users to step into the shoes of
popular comic book characters such as the Hulk and Captain Marvel would be available in 2018. Photo from Oculus

SAN JOSE, California — Oculus, a tech company owned by Facebook, is working

hard to make virtual reality take off.

Virtual reality, or VR for short, is a new technology that stands to revolutionize

video games. With VR, players can step into the world of a game, feeling like they
are actually there, rather than just controlling things from behind a screen.
Oculus is one of just a few companies currently selling VR headsets.

For some video game developers, however, creating VR content seems risky.
Designing and building new games costs money. Right now, many designers seem
worried that there is not a big enough VR audience to make that investment
worthwhile.

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Breaking The VR Buying Cycle

Even though there has been a lot of hype around the new technology, virtual
reality headsets have not been selling as quickly as expected. The fewer people
that have headsets, the fewer will buy newly developed VR games. This is slowing
the development of new games. Here lies the problem. The fewer VR games there
are, the fewer people buy headsets, and the fewer people have headsets, the
fewer VR games there are.

Oculus has been trying to break this cycle. They have been paying game
developers, sharing the cost of building new VR games.

When the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was released in March 2016, only 30
VR titles were available. Now more than 500 titles have been released.

Oculus Is Funding New Game Titles

In July, Oculus announced that “MARVEL Powers United VR” would come out in
2018. It is a multi-player game with popular comic book characters, such as the
Hulk and Captain Marvel. The tech company also released “Echo Arena” and
“Lone Echo,” games that let consumers experience movement in zero gravity.
Those games were fully funded by Oculus.

Oculus Vice President of Content is Jason Rubin. He said that of the 500 games
that are available, about 70 have some Oculus funding. One-third of the 70 titles
are fully funded by Oculus.

“We’re putting money into it, and (developers) stand to make money and also to
learn about VR,” Rubin said.

In October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Oculus would commit
another $250 million to fund the development of new VR games. That brings the
company's total spending on new content to about $500 million.

Seeing Through The Characters' Virtual Eyes

Beyond funding, developing games in virtual reality also comes with design
challenges.

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Glen Egan is president and CEO of Sanzaru, which developed “MARVEL Powers
United VR.” He said that in a traditional game, “the camera and the way it
communicates with the player can be constantly controlled.”

In virtual reality games, however, players step into the skins of the characters
they control and see through characters. This allows more freedom to look
around. Players have to be able to examine things from multiple angles and
distances. This flexibility creates a huge challenge for designers.

Mapping a player's movement to a character's movement is another challenge.

Characters are not always human-size, for example. "Rocket Raccoon has a
relatively small shoulder width, but Hulk’s shoulder width is immense,” Sanzaru
said.

Waiting For The Big Takeoff

Despite these challenges, many people still think that VR will take off.

“I do believe it’s a future computing platform," said Brian Blau, who researches
technology. "But I also think, too, that the products that we have today and all the
software and services is really just step one in a lead up to a mass market use of
VR,” he added.

Still, some video game makers are not willing to take the risk yet.

“They’ve likely got to invest quite a bit of money into any particular title, and they
need to get returns on it,” Blau said. “The situation is there are not enough game
players in any one category to sustain those big-budget titles.”

Zuckerberg has also acknowledged it could take five to 10 years before virtual
reality reaches the masses. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion and
shelled out another $1 billion to keep the company's staff in place. Since then,
Oculus has had some setbacks. There have been shipment delays, a leadership
shuffle, the departure of a co-founder, and a legal battle in court.

Growing Pains

Amid these struggles, Oculus recently dropped the price of its Rift headset and
Touch controllers from $598 to $399 for six weeks. This fueled speculation that
the tech company might be in trouble. The company decided to bundle the Rift
and Touch for $499 after the sale ends.

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While Rubin acknowledged that the company has made mistakes along the way,
he said that bringing on more content to virtual reality is going as planned.

“Eventually, the growing pains of going small to big is going to cause a lot of
interesting things to happen,” Rubin said.

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