2 new facebook funded titles which may be worth a look.
Assassins creed and Splinter cell.not sure but i think they seem to be buying a big chunk of ubisoft.... (talk of up to $1billion which cant surely be just for 2 games).
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/next-on-facebooks-shopping-list-acquisitions-to-beef-up-gaming Oh no... I love Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and (sometime ago) Splinter Cell games. Please don't let Facebook meddle data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 They were dead to me years ago. UPlay bollox.
Looks like they are funding a couple of games. Nothing more. I’ve never bought AC or Spinter Cell either so for me it’s a big meh.
I really don’t see AC being targeted at PC. I think Oculus are looking at Quest 2 in 3 years with a new generation snap dragon processor. I don’t see Facebook promoting PCVR with such a big investment.
I really am against Oculus buying pre existing titles because AC is already a Steam title. So if Oculus make it VR compatible do we suddenly need Revive to play a Steam game or will Facebook remove this title completely from Steam? Or will Facebook create a VR only version for the Oculus Store? It’s one thing creating something for everyone to forward VR adoption and then it’s another taking titles away from over half the VR community to benefit themselves.
Another thing to look at is if we use Oculus as an example of past buy outs we see a huge number of employees leave to join other companies which I think will happen here too.
Facebook will just spur others like Microsoft and Sony into a buying frenzy and the gaming market will be in a worse state than it would if it was left to evolve naturally on its own steam.
How many of us want to buy an Xbox VR, PSVR, Oculus and SteamVR headsets just to get access to all those fragmented Exclusives? Maybe Microsoft will bring their Xbox VR titles to PC when the times comes. But will that be through Steam or the WMR store?
And where is OpenXR? Is this ever going to see the light of day? Or are we seeing a new era where every Studio is bought up and forced to sell their titles on one store only? If that’s the case Valve need to ratchet up their own internal developments and release 3 big titles a year. All I see is a company investing lots of cash into exclusive content the same way as Sony MS and Nintendo. Its all a bit meh! to me at this point. I have no doubt revive etc will allow non Oculus HMD owners to enjoy the fun. Only @Atmos could see AAA titles coming to VR being a BAD thing.
We won't know the state of play with regards to the Oculus Store and OpenXR by the time these games come out in three years or so.
We don't know if Oculus are buying these developers or if Oculus are just funding development. If it's the latter we'll probably be looking at a timed exclusive anyway, something that most Vive owners didn't have a problem with when HTC part funded Fallout 4 VR a few years ago.
As for Microsoft, of course they'll bring their console VR titles to their PC Store. There won't be enough Xbox Two owners out there to make the investment in console only VR worth it, and they have a potential consumer base of a few million PC VR headset owners out there. All they'll need to do is use wrappers, the same way that Valve does with Steam.
Microsoft starting to adopt VR for their NextBox is going to be an essential part of the industry capturing the mainstream gaming consumer market and can only be a GOOD thing. If this starts to happen we're on the way to seeing flat gaming going the way of the Dodo during the next 5-10 years. The undisputable fact is Oculus has the highest number of users, and increasing this number benefits everybody. Some may stay with Oculus hardware, some may change, some might be using the platform with other hardware. Its not until they lock people out that I see a problem. They did block ReVive for a short time and then opened it back up again. Assassin's Creed isn't really a Steam game. It's Unisoft so it's a UPlay game. Ubi just choose to release it on other platforms, like Steam (which still need UPlay to run).
I can't complain about Oculus funding development of titles which are ultimately exclusive. I do hate the practice of buying up traditionally multi platform IP and making it exclusive no matter who is behind it, Epic or Facebook. If that’s true show me the figures. It will be interesting reading.
The official figures I see are from Steam Hardware Survey.
Oculus is on 44%
Vive is on 42%
WMR is on 11%
So native SteamVR HMDs are on 53% because WMR has and official App.
On Oculus Home
Rift has 44%
Vive has 0-10% (Revive users)
WMR has 0-2.5 (Revive user???)
So exclusives going to the Oculus Store cater for 44-56.5% of the entire VR market. They're not official figures, they're the results of the Steam hardware survey.
There are no official figures on HMD sales, number of users etc. that I know of.