HTC: ‘Triple-A publishers risk creating massive rivals by not investing in VR’

The content boss for the Vive VR headset has delivered a warning to major games publishers that are reluctant to invest in virtual reality.

Joel Breton told MCV that these businesses risk enabling ‘massive new competitors’ by not getting in early on virtual reality – akin to what happened in the smartphone space.

The likes of Ubisoft and Bethesda have already committed significant resources to building VR games, but other businesses have adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach. The likes of Take-Two, Activision and EA have either not committed to VR, or are experimenting with smaller VR ‘experiences’.

If this is potentially the future platform for your business, then right now is a great time to stake out your place in the market,” said Breton.

If these companies do wait and see, then they will be again – as they have been in previous generations – a follower. What may end up happening is that new companies appear, who are so aggressive and get so good at VR, that these big publishers will end up with massive new competitors in the market – which they didn’t have before. That is a considerable risk.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have to look that far back to see this happen, because it happened in the mobile and social space quite recently – to all of the big boys. Some of them had to go
out and spend billions of dollars to acquire the leaders in the mobile and social space. If they had only got into it early, and built it up organically, they could have owned their own destiny rather than splash massive amounts of cash to buy their way in later.”

You can read more from HTC in this week’s MCV.