Oculus has confirmed that Crytek’s The Climb is the platform’s best selling Rift game to date, and among a handful of titles that have grossed more than $1 million on the company’s VR storefront.
When it comes to VR platforms today, data is hard to come by. The steadily growing ecosystem is something that everyone is interested in, and while there’s at least some data to go by when it comes to Steam, Oculus’ store is a bit of a black box, which makes any official figures of interest.
The latest comes from the company’s Head of Content, Jason Rubin, who recently confirmed to Road to VR that The Climb (2016) is the Rift’s best selling title to date.
Based on the ‘Top Selling’ listing on Oculus’ store—which puts The Climb near the top—you may not find that surprising, but the exact metric behind the listing is not known, nor the time period over which it’s calculated.
Rubin however confirmed that The Climb is the Rift’s “#1 seller” of all time, which we take to mean by unit sales (though given the game’s $50 price tag, it’s likely to be the top grossing too). That, of course, means that the game is one of four titles which the company recently confirmed have made at least $1 million on the Oculus store alone.
There’s no guessing exactly how many units The Climb has sold by now, but we can get a back-of-the-envelope lower bound by dividing the price of the game by that $1 million threshold, which brings us to 20,000 units (this calculation of course doesn’t account for occasional sales of the game which lower the per-unit cost to some degree).
Rubin called the game “the greatest achievement in VR development so far,” because, for how beautiful the game is, “it was made in eight months, which is amazing.” He accounts for the game’s success on the Oculus store as such: “partly for how long it’s been out, partly because it’s great.” He also attributed a chunk of its appeal to being a great demo title for Rift owners to show first-time VR friends and family.
Indeed, The Climb is somewhat unique because it managed to be something of a double-launch title; first with the Rift launch in early 2016—played at the time with the gamepad—and then with the Touch launch in late 2016 when it was updated to be played with motion controllers. It seems to have been good planning on the part of Crytek to build a game that worked well enough with the gamepad but was poised for the moment that motion input would arrive. And when it did, we said the game “feels like an entirely new experience.”
Crytek also developed and released the more ambitious (but less well received) Robinson: The Journey (2016)—which borrowed some of The Climb’s climbing mechanics—but sadly never saw an update to bring it into to motion input era of VR.
For The Climb’s relative success and praise from Rubin (and a solid user rating on the Oculus store to boot), it’s a shame to hear him confirm that Oculus has no further projects presently in the works with Crytek, which Rubin alluded is partly due to the company’s recent financial struggles.
