(credit: Mark Walton)
Inside the surprisingly humble cafeteria on the ground floor of London’s Framestore, one of the world’s biggest visual effects studios, friends, colleagues, and journalists have gathered to hear a talk from its co-founder and chief creative director, Mike McGee. But rather than wax lyrical about Framestore’s latest Hollywood accomplishments—from which it can count the Oscar-winning VFX in Gravity and the vast CGI sets of The Martian—or its commercial endeavours such as the famous Audrey Hepburn Galaxy chocolate TV advert, McGee is talking about virtual reality. Or rather, how Framestore is already on its way to becoming one of the biggest players in the industry.
Framestore’s bullish attitude to VR—it has already developed experiences for the Oculus, HTC Vive, and Samsung Gear VR, and is working on projects for PlayStation VR and Microsoft HoloLens—stands in stark contrast to that of the games industry, which has thus far remained largely nonchalant about the platform outside of smaller developers. Just yesterday, Take-Two (the publisher of Grand Theft Auto amongst other games) CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the company simply wasn’t “incentivised to be at the frontline of [VR] development,” because of the high asking price and the need for a dedicated play space. Both EA and Activision are taking a “wait and see” attitude to the platform.
It’s an odd turn of events given that the original VR posterboy, the Oculus Rift, was pitched (and still is pitched) as a device primarily designed for playing video games. Meanwhile, the HTC Vive is powered by Steam, the biggest PC gaming platform in the world. As Ars’ own Kyle Orland pointed out, the lack of investment from games companies runs the risk of turning one of the most exciting and promising technologies of the last decade into little more than a niche fad. After all, without that killer app, what reason is there for people to pay for a headset? Conversely, without headsets—just roughly 30,000 Vive units have been sold to consumers according to Steam estimates—why should game companies invest?
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Source: Ars Technica – Sorry games industry, but VR won’t wait—Hollywood is coming for it