HTC today announced that they’ve spun up an internal development and publishing group called Vive Studios.
Mirroring Oculus’ own ‘Oculus Studios’ effort, HTC has formed an internal VR game studio and publishing group called Vive Studios. Like other first-party studios, Vive Studios plans to both create content internally and work with external studios on publishing, marketing, and funding support.
“We’re excited to formally unveil Vive Studios as a new pillar in HTC’s initiative to drive persistent growth for VR,” said Joel Breton, VP of content at HTC Vive. “Vive Studios’ aim is to nurture and discover development talent and help create content that will continually push the boundaries of the kinds of experiences VR can deliver. […] The VR ecosystem needs a persistent flow of exciting experiences and AAA content that can help grow our audience.”
While HTC’s VR partner, Valve, has formerly taken a lead on evangelizing VR content development for SteamVR, the company hasn’t publicly made the sort of major VR content investments that we’ve seen from Oculus and its parent company Facebook. Oculus has a smaller library of VR content on its platform, but most agree what what’s there has greater depth than what’s available on SteamVR (and by extension, the Vive).
Now it seems that HTC wants to change that. The company has supported VR content developers across several other initiatives, but its formal efforts—like the Vive X accelerator—seem focused more on startup & venture style investing than content publishing. Vive Studios is likely to function in a more familiar structure for established game and app developers looking to create top-notch VR content.
While Oculus Studios has primarily focused on gaming content, HTC says Vive Studios will be pursuing many content categories.
“Vive Studios is actively creating content across key categories for VR including games, education, cinematic, design, social, real-estate and sports, as well as tools and applications that can revolutionize areas such as media, retail, healthcare, and location-based entertainment centers and arcades,” the announcement reads.
That fits the broader scope of HTC’s own Viveport VR app platform which is less focused on gaming content than we’ve seen so far from Oculus Home and SteamVR.