CCP CEO: ‘It was right to stop and it was right to start’ VR projects

The CEO of EVE Online developer, CCP Games, has opened up on why the studio shuttered its VR projects.

CCP opened a London studio in 2016 but despite being an early adopter of VR tech, it had to withdraw from those projects in October 2017 due to limited success, forcing the company to shut down its Atlanta office and sell its Newcastle studio to Sumo Digital in early 2018.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Destructoid the studio had "expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period," adding "You can’t build a business on that."

Pétursson went on to acknowledge that by May 2017 the studio realised the tech hadn’t taken off in the way it had hoped.

"May of last year is when we started to figure it out. Was it a surprise? Maybe. But the picture was filling in that there would not be a way to continue with VR as heavily as we were."

"If [VR] does take off – and I mean if – we’ll re-assess," he added. "The important thing is we need to see the metrics for active users of VR. A lot of people bought headsets just to try it out. How many of those people are active? We found that in terms of our data, a lot of users weren’t.

"It was right to stop, and it was right to start. I remain a long-term believer of VR."

CCP Games recently announced a deal with Chinese company NetEase, which will see the latter adopt publishing duties of EVE Online in China.

"CCP and NetEase share a common goal of commitment to quality and service," Pétursson said about the new partnership at the time. "We know that EVE Online fans in China are passionate about their game play, and our unified goal is the least amount of interruption to their gaming journey during EVE Online‘s transition to the new publisher in this market."