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Ubisoft wants to see sales of VR hardware exceed one million units before it green lights projects for devices such as Oculus Rift and Sony’s newly announced Project Morpheus.
"VR would need to sell at least one million units to be viable for development,” Ubisoft vice president of creative Lionel Raynaud told GameSpot during a roundtable interview at GDC in San Francisco.
Raynaud’s comments don’t quite fit with Ubisoft’s pattern of being one of the first third-party companies to support new hardware, as evident from its launch-day support for PS4, Xbox One and Wii U, and even the motion sensing peripherals Kinect and PlayStation Move.
The interest around VR right now is evident from the waves its been making in game development, with studios large and small signing up to take advantage of the new tech.
Rekindled interest in VR started with the crowdfunded Oculus Rift headset, which is already in the hands of studios such as Frontier. Gearing up to compete, Valve discussed plans for its own VR device at its developer conference in January. Sony has begun to lift the lid on its hardware, while talk is that Microsoft is to follow with an announcement of its own in the coming months.
However, despite all the acclaim from the dev community, reports about VR technology causing motion sickness mean that the technology’s success in the consumer market is far from assured.
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