CCP, the studio behind EVE and it’s VR spin-offs, EVE Valkyrie and EVE Gunjack, is to close its Atlanta-based studio and sell off its Newcastle studio, effectively closing down any further development of VR games. The closures will remove CCP’s presence in the United States and cut it’s work force by half in the UK.
CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Iceland Monitor that he still has “faith in virtual reality in the long run”, but the company will be focusing on PC and mobile games going forward. Amusingly Google translate says that CPP will “put the virtual reality on ice cream” but presumably that means they are freezing development.
CCP recently released Sparc on PlayStation VR, we thought it was quite good giving it 7/10 in our review.
Source: Iceland Monitor via Gamasutra
gazzagb
I bet there’s a quote out there from a developer saying they ‘still have faith in Vita in the long run’ cos this sounds ominously similar. Developers not making games because the user base is too small, and the user base is small because of the lack of support. And so the cycle continues.
TSBonyman
It must be even more difficult for developers of online-only VR games to reach a broad enough user base yet.
MrYd
What’s weird is that Eve Valkyrie seems to be quite active. No problems jumping straight into a game with at least 4 or 5 real players per team (bots bring it up to 8 each). And quite often a full 16 player game. And that’s even after they recently changed things to give you less players for matchmaking. (It was previously matching level 5 players with level 50 ones, which is obviously going to end up making for terrible games, but they’ve narrowed things down a bit so you end up standing a chance)
skibadee
thought PSVR was going at a good pace sales-wise? thinking of grabbing one at Xmas