HTC on Thursday launched an in-house studio to develop games and other virtual reality content, following in the footsteps of Samsung and Oculus to become the third major VR headset maker to take a direct role in content creation.
Vive Studios, as the initiative is called, will borrow from the publishing model for console games. It will invest in external video game studios that are making titles for the HTC Vive headset, and it will also market its own games, the first of which, the $29.99 Arcade Saga, is available today for download on Steam.
Arcade Saga is actually a quirky collection of three seperate arcade-style games. At a press demonstration during the Virtual Reality Experience conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, its developers showed off a few of the 84 levels you can master. Most of them are physically demanding, and test the limits of the Vive's motion tracking by making you dodge incoming missiles and bombs in the virtual world all while trying not to trip over the cord connecting your headset to your PC in the real world.
Eventually, Vive Studios plans to branch out beyond video games, setting its sights on applications for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries. For now, the provocative Arcade Saga is a sign that HTC is positioning itself for a long-term battle to win over more gamers to the Vive.
"The VR ecosystem needs a persistent flow of exciting experiences and AAA content that can help grow our audience," HTC Vive's Vice President of Content Joel Breton said in a statement. Although he and other VR industry insiders would like to see that audience expand beyond hardcore gamers, they haven't yet found a way to break into the mainstream.
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"An amazing push for growth is going to be a bit of a sacrifice at the start," VR analyst Stephanie Llamas said at the conference. According to her firm, SuperData Research, 81 percent of consumers are interested in VR to play video games, while just 19 percent say they see it as useful for streaming live events. Still, SuperData forecasts that there will be 130 million active VR users by 2020, up from 16 million today.
As for HTC's Vive Studios, it will be competing against a similar initiative from Facebook-owned Oculus, whose Rift headset is the chief rival to the Vive. Oculus's in-house Story Studio is focused on encouraging indie filmmakers to make VR movies. It unveiled a Microsoft Paint-like tool on Tuesday, called Quill, that takes advantage of the new Oculus Touch controllers to allow professional artists and filmmakers to sketch 3-D scenes.
Meanwhile, Samsung has a partnership with the Sundance Film Festival to create VR movies, and announced in January that it would be opening a small studio in New York City.