With the April 5 consumer launch just around the corner, the Game Developers Conference this week is all about the games for HTC Vive and developer Valve. The companies will be showcasing over 30 virtual reality games on the show floor, including the ILMxLab Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine demo and a playable John Wick: The Impossible Task.
According to Chet Faliszek, writer and virtual reality evangelist at Valve, 50 developers already have HTC Vive store pages on SteamVR that could begin selling content today.
In addition to offering gamers a trio of free virtual reality games—Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption, and Google Tilt Brush— Valve is also giving away more content to early adopters. Among the free content is The Lab, a collection of eight mini-games set within Portal’s universe that includes activities such as fixing a robot, defending a castle, walking on Mars, and adopting a mechanical dog.
Faliszek believes the three HTC Vive games everyone will be talking about at GDC this year are Indimo Labs’ deep role-playing game, Vanishing Realms: Rite of Steel; VR Unicorns’ #Selfie Tennis, a wacky cartoonish tennis game in which you play against yourself; and The Brookhaven Experiment, a horror shooter game featuring assorted scary monsters.
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A growing trend across virtual reality, which also is evident with HTC (HTC) Vive, is multiplayer and social offerings. Faliszek points to Stress Level Zero’s Hover Junkers and Survio’s Raw Data as two examples.
“Games are a social experience across all platforms because of the shared nature of the medium,” Faliszek says. “Adding multiplayer and social to virtual reality with presence is natural. But we’re still just scratching at the surface of what works and doesn’t work in VR.”
Faliszek believes more developers will enter the virtual reality space and be able to create and iterate games and other experiences by developing in virtual reality. Both Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 and Unity Technologies’ Unity 5 now allow developers to create virtual reality content within VR.
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“This will speed up the process of designing VR games and companies will save time and money through shorter development schedules,” Faliszek says.
Gamers will have a variety of game genres and prices to choose from at launch, including some free-to-play demos, some longer experiences, single-player games, and multiplayer and social games.
Faliszek says that while individual demos such as the ones at GDC are typically 3½ minutes long, the actual depth of gameplay will range based on developers. HTC and Valve also combine a series of demos together into 15- to 30-minute experience that can connect with different gamers.
“As developers continue to explore VR, you’ll see longer and longer game experiences,” Faliszek says.
One thing HTC Vive and Valve are not focusing on with the virtual reality lineup are exclusive games.
“We have no exclusives,” Faliszek says. “We don’t think that’s a good thing for the industry, especially in VR where we’re starting out with a promise of presence after so many years. We want to do everything we can to make sure VR succeeds, regardless of the platform. I don’t think a customer ever thinks a platform-exclusive game is a good thing.”