Over the last year, Oculus’ public hardware ambitions have mostly centered around their upcoming standalone headsets (Oculus Go and Santa Cruz), with little to say about what’s next for the company’s PC VR headset, the Rift. Addressing a small but growing anxiety among their Rift user base—that Oculus is shifting focus away from PC VR in its efforts to push mobile VR—the company affirmed at GDC that its commitment to the PC VR ecosystem hasn’t changed, and the company believes PC will lead the VR industry for the next decade.
Speaking during a session at GDC 2018 this week, Oculus’ Head of Content, Jason Rubin, addressed the company’s commitment to PC VR as one of the very first topics covered.
“I want to be really really clear here: PC is vital to the VR business. We think PC will lead the industry for the next decade or more,” he said. “There’s so much more we’re going to be able to do with VR, and PC is where we figure that out. So Oculus is investing just as much in PC as ever. We’re in all three categories [PC, mobile, and standalone], and plan to stay there.”
Part of that investment is presumably in future PC VR hardware, though the company has steered clear of directly addressing plans for anything like a ‘Rift 2’, even going so far to say that they don’t expect the original Rift to see a successor until at least 2019.
Where the company has been visibly investing in the future of PC VR is in their ongoing funding of Oculus exclusive titles.
“What we think consumers want, and what’s going to work, is AAA content. And we’re going to invest in that.” Rubin continued, saying that, now that VR is growing, Oculus Studios is focusing on funding fewer, larger titles than in the past. The company believes that big budget content will draw players into the Oculus ecosystem, and then smaller developers will benefit from the larger addressable audience.
Back in July last year, Rubin told us that the company’s content investments had grown to the $1 million to $5 million range, and in October the company revealed a yet named VR title in production from Respawn Studios, the developers of Titanfall.