Well-known videogame publishers are slowly but surely getting on board with virtual reality (VR) technology. Having first said it would need to see sales of one million units before it got into VR, Ubisoft now has several projects in the works for head-mounted displays (HMDs), while Capcom’s Resident Evil team is also working on them. One publisher that’s yet to commit to VR development, however, is EA. Sadly, it seems like it may still be some time before the company starts to put its resources into the likes of the Oculus Rift.
Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said as much at this UBS Global Technology Conference this week, as reported by Gameranx. “I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market,” Jorgensen of the tech. “We don’t make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough, the PS Vita — the Sony product — we don’t make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it’s all about the size of the market.
“As one of the largest software producers we have all of the manufacturers of equipment coming to us to try to sell us on their equipment and giving us development kits to try to build software for it,” he continued. “So we’ll build software for various ones but we’ll really wait and see how big the market is going to be.”
Back at E3 2015 EA noted that its Frostbite could perhaps one day power VR titles, but it appears it isn’t doing so at the moment. This week sees the company launch easily its biggest title of the year in Star Wars: Battlefront, but Industrial Light and Magic’s new Experience Lab (ILMxLAB) is at least working on VR Star Wars content, so rest assured that the sci-fi universe will reach HMDs to some degree.
VRFocus will continue to follow the latest VR updates from EA, reporting back with anything further progress.
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