Oculus VR have, since the beginning of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter rollercoaster, stated that without good content, VR wouldn’t achieve launch velocity. They put their money where their mouth was back in February when they announced they’d be co-publishing CCP Games’ made-for-VR space combat game EVE Valkyrie as a flagship title. Now, the company has announced the next title to receive the published-by-oculus seal of approval and it’s called Lucky’s Tale.
The title is apparently an adventure game that’s built from the ground up for virtual reality and the Oculus Rift and is being developed by a company called ‘Playful’. Little else is known about the new game and it’s doubtful we can glean much from Playful’s previous title ‘Words with Friends’, a multi-player scrabble clone – which is apparently extraordinarily popular amongst the social-network fuelled casual gaming arena. Whatever the game turns out to be, it’s great to see Oculus continuing their drive for great, made for VR content to push their Rift platform. It perhaps gives us a glimpse as to where Oculus see their revenue coming from in the long term, given their pledge to try and sell their VR Headset hardware as cheaply as possible.
Paul Bettner, founder of Playful says of the venture “Virtual reality — I mean truly accurate, comfortable virtual reality — is the most important thing to happen to interactive entertainment in decades”. We’re not going to argue with him.
Moar Recruits!
Frankly, if more than a couple of days passes without more news of Oculus hiring some talented individual, we start to feel restless. So, inevitably, Oculus have announced that they’ve hired the super talented Jason Holtman. Jason is yet another Valve veteran, one who helped pioneer digital game distribution back when DRM was a filthy term amongst PC gamers. Jason helped make Valve’s Steam platform a reality and joins Oculus as their ‘Head of Platform’.
Given Holtman’s CV and the somewhat non specific nature of his new job title, it may well be that he’s joined Oculus to help them build their own digital distribution platform. Oculus states that he’ll be “..building the world’s best developer and player VR ecosystem”. Sounds as if Oculus are positioning themselves for world domination, or at the very least to build an incredible developer publishing portal for gamers to consume VR titles from.
