Don’t expect much from VR for the next five years, CCP warns

It will take the best part of an entire console lifecycle before virtual reality starts to VR starts to strut its stuff commercially.

That’s according to the CEO of EVE Valkyrie developer CCP, who has told Polygon that studios must be prepared for half a decade of hard graft before reaping the rewards of their VR investments.

"It’s a ten-year plan," Hilmar Ptursson said. "We have taken the view that the first five years are going to be very slow and they’re going to be very chaotic, and a lot of things are going to change and a lot of things are going to fail. But in the second five years, then we’re going to see a rapid expansion like we’ve never seen before. But it’s going to take five years from this year to sort itself out.”

However, despite his championing of the long-term view, Ptursson still refused to reveal any short-term sales numbers, even though his argument presumably means that they are largely meaningless.

I can’t really do that," he replied when asked to reveal EVE Valkyrie’s sales numbers. "I think it would be much better for the platform companies to talk about their own numbers. I don’t want people to be triangulating their numbers out of our numbers.

"Is there a lot of hardware [right now]? It’s all based on what people are expecting, and I’ve seen people are expecting a lot of hardware this year, but we never expected that. We had the expectation of the first five years of VR are going to be madness, and we’re going to structure ourselves to find success in that madness."