Clever Geek Handbook

What can the VR market teach a game designer?





VR is alive and continues to evolve. But what does a VR game need to make a profit? Let's see how you can analyze the market, and why it is useful to get acquainted with the titles from the tops.



In the article:





Introduction



This article is worth writing now, as it is rapidly losing relevance. I follow popular projects that use virtual reality technology (VR), most of all I'm interested in games that seriously involve the user. And I made a rough quality model by which to predict the success of the game.



What is at stake? Suppose we want to create a profitable VR game, and we have a (relatively modest) budget of $ 500,000. To beat off the invested funds, you need to sell 25,000 copies for $ 30 each. In fact, the price will be lower ($ 20-25), and many copies will be sold at a discount on sales on Steam. The budget may be higher (for example, 1-2 million dollars). But it is also likely that your sales will be twice as good if you release the game under PSVR, or even three times if you release it under Oculus Quest (a bold assumption, the numbers are very approximate, of course).



In 2018, Steam introduced over 1,000 VR games. Even if 80% of them are just rubbish, you need to go around another 165 other games so that your sales reach 25,000 copies. The reality is that around the 35th place in the list of the best-selling titles of 2018 are games that were bought about 25,000 times.



We will analyze everything a little more in detail below, but the bottom line is that in 2018, a clear relationship between sales and active users is visible. This means that the highest sales are for those games that people launch again and again. And here the relevant question arises: how to increase your chances of creating a profitable VR game by analyzing titles from the top?



An answer awaits us at the end of this article. Just remember: I rely on Steam as a representative sample of the market.



What do users choose?



Looking at what VR titles people play on Steam in a day, you’ll get something like this list:





The list is sorted in descending order of the number of players. Beat Saber usually attracts 1000-1500 users, Pavlov - about half as much. Rec Room, B&S and H3VR have several hundred users, the rest have 120-200.



(Rec Room and The Lab are free, so we won’t take them into account anymore.)



Most on this list have 200,000-500,000 Steam owners. Some have less. B&S, Elven Assassin, STAND OUT, and Zero Caliber have 40,000-100,000 downloads. Do not forget that you can’t just multiply the number of players by the price to get the total income, because users could get the games for free or at a serious discount. But a large number of owners usually mean high income.



All these games are in the top 20 of the best-selling titles of 2018. Despite the fact that there are much fewer active users than owners, the list of top games is relatively stable. So, all of them hit the top at all by chance.



Only a few titles from the top 20 best-selling games of 2018 are not included in the list of games with an active user base:





They have from 20,000 to 100,000 owners on Steam and, as a rule, 10+ times less active users for a certain period.



Linear single players are highlighted in bold, that is, you play them once and get all the possible experience, so it is not surprising that they do not have an active user base. The rest - OrbusVR, Raw Data, and Sairento VR - spun thanks to being a kind of pioneer. OrbusVR is the first VR MMO game, and Raw Data and Sairento were among the first games with a lot of content and good graphics. Thanks to this, they gained fame in the VR market and still attract the attention of users, despite the fact that they can not maintain the interest of the player for a long time. I think that Sprint Vector to some extent also became a pioneer, the game was developed by Survios, the same company that released Raw Data (and therefore received increased attention from users).



Many games from the top have become pioneers. Some of them are very high-quality projects that arose at the stage of market formation: Space Pirate Trainer, Arizona Sunshine, Job Simulator and SUPERHOT. Some occupied separate niches, although their quality is not necessarily as high: STAND OUT and H3VR.



Perhaps these games have special inherent features that could teach us something?



Only 40% of the games from the top have multiplayer. It would seem that games with an active user base should support this mode. If we consider the top 35 best-selling games (in which we need to get in order for the game to pay for itself), only 25% have multiplayer. I used to think that a VR game is required to support multiplayer, even if people do not use it especially, because it increases the subjective value of the product in the eyes of users. But this is not so. In terms of numbers, at the moment, support for multiplayer does not justify the effort .



An active user base raises sales, since with it the game falls on Steam on the tab “What worlds immerse others” (What's Being Experienced). It looks like this:







Seductive list, speaking as a gamer. It includes games that cannot be abandoned. Buying a game from this list, I am almost sure that it will pay off its value.



Some VR games may have been successful, despite the low replay value. The first to come to mind are Moss and I Expect You To Die. However, by creating a game that gamers will return to every night, you significantly increase your chance of making a profit.

If people constantly play some kind of game, it means that they discuss it both online and in real life. Do not underestimate word of mouth when predicting sales in the VR market.



It is extremely difficult to give out a product that will captivate people for months, given that each player wants to get something different. And here, mods and user-generated content (UGC) are incredibly cool . It is not surprising that games with the most extensive user bases have mod support and a lot of UGC: VR chat, Rec Room, Beat Saber, Pavlov VR, B&S and Skyrim. Mods for these games are even more popular than the original titles.



If a game cannot be imagined without mods, as is often the case with the projects that we presented above, this does not mean that the developer did something wrong. On the contrary, he created a platform that continues to delight people and generate sales without additional efforts on his part. The holy grail of VR game development: maximum engagement with minimal cost.



Thus, the basic template for a potentially profitable VR game is a mod-enabled single player that the gamer launches every night and about which he wants to tell other people.



Three pillars of development



Why do players return to the product? Why do they put on the VR helmet again when they could do other things? I believe top games have succeeded in at least one of three areas:





The game cycle, pleasant for a touch, is a basic core loop with which you feel good during the movement. The best VR games in this respect allow players to feel like children in a sandbox, they only do what is fun. Beat Saber, B&S, GORN, Space Pirate Trainer and SUPERHOT - it's nice to move in all these games. You almost do not stick, trying to point the controller at some object, there is no fuss with the menu or small objects. They have turns, you need to move smoothly and flexibly. Describing the game to your friends, you can move and make all kinds of sounds that will help convey your experience.



A bright character is the case when the hero of the game or his attitude to the game as a whole does not allow him to tear himself away. The perky narrator in Arizona Sunshine fills the game with life, without it she would be bored after an hour. Job Simulator catches a foolish atmosphere of absurdity. GORN is a comic bloody action-mix of a comic with a bloody one that instantly draws players into its universe.



And finally, the fulfillment of dreams - this is what most people are looking for in a VR game. People want to be Jedi, gladiators, sailors, wizards, those who survived in the zombie apocalypse. Through a story, action, or surrounding reality, a game in which dreams are fulfilled transfers a person to another time, place, or assigns him a new role. Returning to the real world becomes a shock, and people rush back - to where they were not what they are in real life.



Some VR games operate solely through dreaming. People continue to call Skyrim VR a non-vapid VR port. However, he is included in the list of most played titles, thanks to a diverse and exciting environment. H3VR is a weapon simulator with mod support. Most successful VR projects are at least partially aimed at fulfilling dreams. Even Beat Saber, a game without a storyline, raises enthusiastic comments about how cool it is to wield a lightsaber.



It is clear that each of these pillars is very subjective. Different people love different characters, everyone has different dreams, and everyone expects different emotions. For example, I can’t stand fiddling with a bow and arrow in VR, but many like it - so what, in terms of the number of corresponding VR games, only shooters outdid archery.



The goal of the developer is to prepare a concept in which the target audience will find all three pillars described. In this case, we must not forget about what else needs to be done for the success of the game. For example, you must provide a unique selling point (USP), and the game should be easy to market. Three pillars must be taken into account, but they are not enough to succeed.



Does your VR game fit the definition below?

Single player, fulfilling the dreams of players. Having put on a VR-helmet, the user instantly plunges into a pleasant to touch core loop, and the bright character does not allow to leave the game. People want to share their impressions of the game, run it again and again, exploring user-generated content and mods to play exactly what they want and how they want.


More articles:


All Articles