With the advent of VR looming over the horizon many people are wondering where to pitch their tent. Should you shack up with Sony and its VR? It seem to be doing well, the PS4 is crushing the Xbox One. What about Microsoft’s HoloLens? You could play Minecraft like the virtual Lego game it always resembled. Valve also threw its hat into the ring with the HTC Vive, you could continue not to play Half-Life 3 on it. Or are all these $600 investments too rich for you, Google offers an economy VR experience with Google Cardboard for just $20. Well a new study coming out of the Game Developers Conference says that most developers are siding with Oculus.
According to Gamespot, among the questions asked in the “State of the Industry” survey a few were about VR/AR and its future in the industry. The first asked developers which VR platform they were developing for, if any, and 19 percent said that they were developing a game for the Rift. Which might not be a lot but among the ten options presented Oculus’s closest competitor was Samsung’s Gear VR with 7 percent. You can see how the rest of the responses broke down below.
It might just be a fluke, Oculus was first after all. Maybe it’s just more well known. There are a ton of companies with VR tech coming out this year, hell, I never even heard of Google Cardboard until I began researching for this article! However there was another question that asked developers which of the myriad of VR/AR systems are they most interested in and Oculus took it again. With a whooping 40 percent of developers saying they were interested in the Rift with it’s closest peers, PlayStation’s VR and HTC Vive, mustering half that at 26 percent.
It’s clear that the Oculus Rift is popular, but why? Is it because it is easier to develop for than the alternatives or, like I said before, is it just the most well known. VR is going to be the way of the future, with other mediums like film already embracing the VR phenomenon, but who will be at the forefront? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.