Can you make a living out of AR and VR?

Today I want to answer a question that from time to time people ask me: is it possible to make a living out of AR and VR? Can you just follow your passion, and pay the bills by creating XR-related content?

Well, let me tell you my thoughts about this.

The short answer is yes

Yes, it is possible to live by working in the AR and VR fields. We all know people that are famous in our ecosystem and whose job is all about AR and VR: journalists like Ben Lang (Road To VR) and Ian Hamilton (Upload VR); developers like Danny Unger (Cloudhead Games) or Dennys Kuehnert (Holonautic, that is the studio behind Hand Physics Lab); Influencers like Alan Smithson, or Nathie; movie directors like Felix & Paul. There are many people that earn enough in the AR and VR field and that don’t need to have another job.

Another one that you may now is… me. That’s why I’m writing this post, to show you that is possible to make a living out of the thing that we love the most (or well, it’s at least in the top 5 of the things that we love love the most in our lives…)

The long answer is… yes, but it may not be easy

The difficult situation of some years ago

Some weeks ago, I was reading the post where Cloudhead Games described its story, and it resonated a lot with me. Cloudhead is one of the most famous VR game studios out there, but they recalled how during the winter of VR they thought to abandon the VR field because the business was not sustainable for them. I lived a similar situation in the years 2017-2018, that is the Winter of VR, the period that you may remember the most for being the “VR is dead” era.

In those years, it was very hard for me to get any project to do: I just started with New Technology Walkers, we still had to create our network of contacts and build our brand, and most people we talked with were really unsure about doing something with XR. They were intrigued by the technology, but the costs were too high, the use cases not that known, and there was also this idea that probably “AR could have been better than VR”, even if customers had not even a clear idea of what was the difference between AR and VR .

If you asked me if it was possible to live out of XR in 2017, my answer would have been “no”. Most people I spoke with were in “survival mode”, trying to make their business barely survive… usually doing other projects in parallel.

A new course

After the Quest and the other standalone headsets, and all that came with them, the situation has improved a lot. Headsets are now more affordable, and the use cases are clearer to everyone: not only in the B2B space but also among consumers, that have discovered new applications like fitness. There have been histories of success, repeatable successes. VR has got the attention of the mainstream thanks to Alyx and the commercials by Oculus.

Also, the pandemic, which has been a really terrible thing, has actually accelerated the digital development of at least 1-2 years, and this has benefit also the XR ecosystem.

Analysts now don’t say anymore that VR has died. We read every month the stories of the success of someone that has earned $1M on Quest, or whose startup has received investments for millions of dollars. Above in the first paragraph, I also mentioned to you various people that are successfully working in our ecosystem.

Don’t fall in the survivorship bias trap

Survivorship bias is one of the biases I love talking about the most: is when you consider only what you can see, and make assumptions out of it. On the web, during the events, etc… you hear mostly the stories of who succeeded, and rarely also the ones of who failed. For every studio that made $10M on Quest, maybe 20 indie studios have worked on some VR games of theirs that they never published, or that went on Steam but no one cared about, or that were refused by Oculus. There are most probably many more people that failed doing VR games than the few ones whose success the big stores highlight in their blog posts. That’s why I love speaking about people like Julien Dorra, an indie developer that is doing everything he can to promote not only his own game but also the games of other indies so that to have the biggest number of downloads possible, fighting against the hurdles of App Lab… or about people like Cix Liv, that had a very promising startup that was crushed by Facebook’s competition.

VR is still in its early stages, everyone in the field says this. It’s a business that is growing, it’s a technology that is gone past its trough of disillusionment, but it’s not mature yet. Now there are the conditions to be successful, and it’s much easier to make a living out of VR now than before, but it’s still very hard. Don’t fall into the trap of looking only at the successes and think that everyone in XR is doing great.

I keep being contacted for XR projects that never come true. Sometimes I meet a new company and tell them about the wonders of AR and VR, they seem excited, but then when they call me back, they tell me “hey, we need a website, can you help us with this?”. Many of my non-techie friends still don’t understand completely the technology. Many people keep asking me when will they succeed, because they have worked hard in the field for years, but they have still not seen the success they would deserve.

Make a living out of VR is still not easy, and some people have still to keep doing other things to make a living: I know developers that still develop apps and websites, or movie directors that still shoot 2D movies, etc… In some cases it is because they like to work on multiple technologies, in others, it is a necessity.

For years, market analysts have promised us that XR would have been a goldmine, and in my opinion, the number of people that have actually found much gold is still quite little. But always more people are finding nuggets, and the ecosystem is growing positively.

You can do it

I can tell you that is possible to live out of AR and VR because I do that myself and I see always more XR people in my communities whose situation is getting better. As I’ve said, we are probably out of the nasty trough of disillusionment, so we are on the so-called slope of enlightenment, and the technology and the market are growing.

Some days ago, PwC has said that VR is the fast-growing media in revenue terms, with a 30% year-over-year growth expected from 2020 to 2025. We have seen in the last two weeks many startups getting solid investments in the order of magnitude of the millions of dollars (e.g. VRChat, Engage, Rec Room, Tripp, Resolution Games, etc…). The rumors of an Apple XR headset are making everyone excited. People with VR skills are always more requested (and my friends at XR Bootcamp know that well), and I personally get various unsolicited job proposals every month. The ecosystem is flourishing again, and it is not just hype, but there are a real market and solid use cases (e.g. training).

It is actually a good moment to be in VR, because there is a lot of positivity and there is growth. But it is still a niche: as Mathew Olson from The Information highlights, “[PwC data] translates to a projected $6.9 billion in content revenue by 2025—huge for VR, but tiny compared to the $194 billion PwC projects for overall videogame revenues”. We are still working in a small environment, you have to remember that. But in our little bubble, the success cases are increasing and the ecosystem is becoming self-sustainable.

This is the right moment to try to make a living out of AR and VR both in case you want to be independent or you want to become an employee. Let me give you some pieces of advice on how this can happen.

How to maximize your chances of make a living out of AR and VR

Let me give you some pieces of advice on how you can maximize your probability of succeeding in AR and VR. Actually, they are generic pieces of advice to succeed in whatever technology, but you can use them for AR and VR the same. At least all those things worked for me, and I hope they can help you too.

Outreach

I’ve heard someone saying that success is 10% talent, 30% personal branding, and 60% connections. I don’t know if the percentages are true, but I totally agree that your network is one of the biggest assets you may have in your career. With connections you can have freelance works, you may be informed of open job positions that fit you, you may be proposed interesting opportunities, and so on. I have verified this myself too: thanks to the blog I run, and the various communities I am in, and my participation in many XR events, I get many requests for collaborations.

Outreach actually can mean many possible things:

• It can be you being part of the communities;
• It can be that you have someone in your company that tries to push other companies/people to buy your products;
• It can be contacting the press to promote your content;
• It can make writing content to promote yourself;
• It can be using paid content on social media to show off yourself;
• It can be sending your curriculum to many companies;

These are just some examples, but there are many others. The lesson is always the same: put yourself under the spotlight, make people discover about you somehow. Otherwise, you can be the best XR professional in the world, but if no one knows about you, you will hardly get any kind of job. One good tool to promote yourself is Linkedin: I got many requests there, both for possible hires, or freelance gigs.

In any case, what I have noticed is that the best thing you can do is making many friends. When I talk with someone else within our sector, I don’t do that “because he/she may be useful to me”, but because I really love to connect with new people, and I love also to help and support them. And many people I talk with love to support me and love to exchange their opinion with me. Basically, I have many friends I have never even met in real life. And when I have an opportunity I can involve them, I do, because they are friends to me, and they do the same for me. This is how the opportunities multiply for me.

Don’t walk alone

Whatever journey you will take, don’t be alone, but have a community of people that are very close to you with which you support each other. Especially people that are different from you and have other skills that can compensate yours.

I think I would never have done what I did until now if I hadn’t worked with people like Gianni Rosa Gallina or Beppe Platania at Immotionar; Massimiliano Ariani at New Technology Walkers; Louis Cacciuttolo, Lapo Germasi and Victor Pukhov at VRrOOm. In whatever company you will be, in whatever working group you are in, make sure that you are with people with which you work well, that want to grow with you, that can support you when you have problems, that can also teach you something and show you another point of view. If you don’t have such a group, then probably you are in the wrong place.

XR is a complicated field, and it is quite stressful to work in, because there are always problems to cope with. So be sure to have a good supporting team for you.

Differentiate

If you still haven’t found your way to make a living, do many things at the same time. During the winter of VR, I have written AR applications, helped with websites, written posts on external blogs, contributed to computer vision applications, even tried to be a social media manager.

Try to differentiate your revenue streams, inside the XR field or even outside. This helps a lot if you want to be independent. Even if you are an employee, having a side gig could help you in having additional money and also to learn something new that can be useful in your career. It can also be that you have a standard job for instance in a web agency, and then your side gig is in VR, so that you can live the VR dream using your day job to pay the bills.

Talking about what I’m doing myself in 2021, I’m earning money by:

• Writing content on my blog (Patreon donations + Google ads)
• Working on VR Events together with VRrOOm
• Developing AR/VR content for third parties with New Technology Walkers
• Having private consultancies on the technological/business side of XR for investors/entrepreneurs

I am also planning to earn money with HitMotion: Reloaded, the game that we of New Technology Walkers are developing and that is currently free on SideQuest.

As you can see, I have multiple revenue streams, and this is necessary because as a freelancer/entrepreneur I know that every one of them has its ups and downs: for instance, VR events were rocking in 2020, but now that the pandemic restrictions are lifting, they are a bit less relevant, because people want to go outside in the real world, not being on Zoom or VRChat (but they’ll grow again later on, I’m sure of that). If you have multiple skills and multiple possible revenue streams, most probably you will have revenues all the time. Also working on so many things, I’m learning a lot in different sectors, and this keeps me smart and awake.

Focus on big and recurrent projects

This is a lesson mostly for entrepreneurs and freelancers: try to get big and recurrent projects, and keep the small isolated ones only when you have nothing else to do or occupy just a tiny part of your time.

I made the error of not following this rule at the beginning of my career and this was hurting me and the whole NTW in general. We got little gigs of €5K, €10K and in the beginning, it was good because they made the wheel start rolling, but after that, there was no growth for our team.

The reason why isolated small projects are usually not good are obvious:

• You just earn the money to survive and they don’t give any kind of money for growth (e.g. to hire new people)
• They just give you the money to pay the bills for one month, but don’t guarantee you the serenity that you can live for the next months doing your job
• They are full of hidden costs: every customer wants to have meetings, and every customer will ask for modifications or bug fixes after you have delivered your application. Sometimes even after some months after you have finished it, so you have to take the time to re-learn what you had written. The more the projects, the more these hidden costs
• Managing a €100K project for a customer is much easier than managing ten €10K projects for 10 customers
• They are usually not even good for the portfolio because they don’t involve famous brands, and the resulting experience is a POC or anyway a small one so it is not that great to showcase as well

And don’t fall for the traps:

• A small project doesn’t lead to other small projects by word-of-mouth. Usually, it is just isolated, so don’t delude yourself;
• If someone makes you do a small project for little money (or even for free) and then promises that big money will come at “the next stage”, just don’t trust him/her. 90% of cases, it doesn’t happen: either the prototype doesn’t succeed and the project ends there, or the prototype succeeds but he/she asks a bigger company to do it, or he/she just hires someone else to do that.

Little projects are good at the beginning when you have to test your team; or you want to experiment with a technology that you don’t know well; or it is the first project you do with a new partner; or when a friend of yours asks for help; or when you have nothing else to do. Otherwise, they are not a good thing.

You should aim to either big projects (including grants, investments, etc…) or projects with recurring revenues. Big projects give you visibility to survive for months, plus also give you enough budget to let you expand your team. Yes, they are not easy to get or to handle, but as soon as you get one, you immediately notice the difference: you have a budget to allocate for months, you can finally hire people, you can start dreaming big. Plus, usually, they give you something cool to put in your portfolio.

Recurring projects make sure that you or your team have some sure money every month, so you know that even in the worst scenario, you still have that money, that can give you the tranquillity that you can safely pay the bills. Even here, you have visibility of what you can do in the next months. And the more recurring projects, the better. Own products (e.g. a game that you sell in the store) usually fall in this category.

All freelancers and small companies around me survive either with big projects (usually grants) or with recurring projects (services or own products). I still don’t know someone in my freelance communities that lives out of tiny independent projects. So aim at these kinds of gigs… I know it’s not easy, but you can do it. As for the big projects, for instance, you can evaluate the various grants that are around you, or you can have some business ideas and look for good investments. If you are a game studio, you can also try looking for publishers, or Kickstarter campaigns (that are anyway harder than people think). Try to be creative if you want to grow.

Talking about my current situation: Patreon is a recurrent revenue for me (thanks to all my amazing Patrons, join them please!), and so is the VR events work, since I am always working on new events and performances.

Work on your skillset

Always try something new, always try to learn. Work on your XR skills, so that you are able to deliver what you are asked to do. I think this is pretty obvious.

Another piece of advice is to try to have a special skill set that may be appreciated by who wants to hire you: for instance, there are many XR developers, but there are not many that have also skills with computer vision or with Kinects. These are some strong points that I can highlight when I talk with people and may come useful with companies that are looking for specific jobs. I remember that when my friend Mikko Rissanen described how he got successful on Upwork in this very interesting post, he said that he focused on promoting himself as a Kinect developer because it was a niche that was little enough and where he had strong skills, so he had more probability to succeed. And in fact, he succeeded, becoming the n.1 Kinect developer on Upwork.

Also work on your soft skills, in particular, learn to deliver always and on time. This often is appreciated much more than your mere technical skills.

Seize the opportunities

In this fantastic article I read many years ago, it was highlighted what was the difference between people that believe to be lucky and the ones that think they are unlucky.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

From You Are Not So Smart

The rationale is that you create your own luck putting yourself in good situations and seizing the opportunities.

When you see a possible opportunity lying around you, try to get it, even if it seems that it is too big for you or it doesn’t fit you completely. In 2019 I saw Louis Cacciuttolo asking in some XR groups if we knew a spare developer to join VRrOOm as an employee. I was not interested in being an employee, but I anyway asked him if he was also ok for external collaboration, and surprisingly, he accepted. And here we are, almost two years later, that we have done together massive virtual events like SXSW 2021 or the concert of Jean-Michel Jarre for which I have been even mentioned by Unity itself on its website.

Or create opportunities by yourself, by starting new projects, asking people for collaborations, asking sponsors for money, asking companies to hire you. We of NTW started HitMotion: Reloaded because we asked HTC if it could be interested in a fitness game for the launch of the Vive Focus Plus. Again, they accepted, and we found ourselves launching our game on a stage in China.

Or one day I decided to do a stupid thing and publish a cube on Oculus App Lab, and that news was published by Road To VR, Forbes, and many other important magazines. I was brave enough to try an experiment, and in the end, it has been good for us of NTW and for the XR community in general.

Create your luck whenever you can, don’t be shy, don’t be afraid, seize all the opportunities you can.

Don’t give up

We are all here for the long run. As Jake Zim said to me, we should be committed to staying in this field for 10 years. AR and VR can only grow from now on, but we have to be patient because they will need time. If you are not living out of VR now, probably you can do that next year, or in 2 years. Don’t give up… you can take a pause, you can pivot to something else for a while, but you can be sure that at a certain point you can live out of this amazing technology.

I started in 2014 when it was early, and I had no business knowledge, so it took me a lot: around 4-5 years to reach this current status. I have always worked a lot, I have blindly followed my passion, and in the end, now I can live by producing VR content. I’m sure you can do much better than me. Good luck! 🙂