My experience as a VR professional at Gamescom and Devcom 2021

As I told you at the beginning of my latest news roundup, I have attended both the Devcom and the Gamescom together with my biz partner Max: we were at Devcom to promote our game HitMotion: Reloaded, and at Gamescom as members of the press to discover the latest announcements about VR and try interesting VR demos. Since many indie devs were in doubt if attending these events or not, let me tell you my brief experience with them from this year.

My experience as a VR indie developer at Devcom

Devcom is the part of Gamescom devoted to game developers and it features events, talks, networking opportunities all dedicated to game developers. We of NTW joined the event with a Business Pass to be able to access the pitch event dedicated to promoting your game in front of an audience of publishers. You know that we are looking for funds to develop our VR fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded, and Max thought Devcom could be a good opportunity to meet with potential partners and investors.

Regarding this opportunity, I have mixed impressions. For sure Devcom has organized things well to try to help game developers in finding partners: we had an online meeting and matchmaking platform (called “PINE”) where we could discover the other attendees and the speakers of the event. Everyone could say what he/she was offering (we were offering game development, for instance) and what he/she was looking for (in our case, publishing partners). You could filter people depending on what they could offer, and easily find potential partners. After that, you could use the platform to contact them via chat or try to book a 30-minutes meeting to have a videocall with the other person.

Since I had a business pass, I also received a dedicated list with more than 50 publishers with all the related info about them: I could see their typical investment size, the platforms they were interested in, where they were located, etc… and also the link of the right person to contact on the PINE platform.

This was all great and well-conceived, but it also led me to a cold shower of reality. I examined the spreadsheet with the details on the publishers and I worked to select the ones that could fit more our game (remember: never contact ALL the publishers, just the ones that may fit your game!). Among the 50 publishers listed there, only TWO stated they were potentially interested in VR games. It’s a 4% ratio. I thought some of them may have just forgot to add “VR” to their list of platforms, and included it inside the “PC” umbrella, so I went on contacting the publishers that may fit us just considering the other data I had, like the games they were looking for (e.g. I looked for the ones interested in “sport” games and that could give us the funding amount that we need). Among all publishers I contacted, this was the result:

• Half of them rejected my meeting request with an answer that was always the same: “Thanks Tony for the interesting proposal, but we don’t handle VR games at the moment. Let us know if you have PC or mobile games you want to talk with us”. They don’t even wanted to have a meeting, because they already knew they were not interested in VR at all
• A big percentage of the others completely ignored my request and didn’t even answer
• Less than 5 of them accepted to meet me
• Only 1 of them was deeply interested into VR (because this company has already sold successful VR games), while the other ones I met were just exploring or evaluting the VR market.

I think this is an indicator of the current status of the VR gaming market: even if it is growing, and the Quest 2 is selling very well, many people in the industry still see it as something that is too niche and difficult to make money from. 4% of publishers interested in VR is a pretty sad percentage: Gamescom is one of the most famous gaming events, and it attracts developers and publishers from all over the world (there were some from China, US, Europe, etc…) that work on all possible technologies… so I think it is a good indicator of the overall interest in VR form the publishers. I think that in general, even wanting to inflate a bit the numbers to not overfit it on the single data I have, for sure no more than 10% of publishers are strong believers in VR games.

This is a huge problem for us indie VR developers: we are usually small teams, and VR games require a bigger budget than for instance 2D platformers, so we need investors and publishers, but only a tiny fraction of them is available to listen to us. I sincerely hope that after the Quest 2 will reach the magic number of 10M of units, next year the situation will be better. Because at the moment, it is quite complicated.

It is true that there are also fewer VR games than their mobile/PC/console counterparts, so the competition is lower, but it would be great if more publishers were interested at least in exploring the technology. I mean, we have already many success stories about VR games, and some studios have also already been acquired, so I think the gaming ecosystem should have more faith in it.

Included with the business package, we also had the opportunity of participating in the “PitchIt!” event, where we had 10 minutes to pitch our game in front of an audience of publishers and partners of the Devcom. Of course, we exploited it, and Max and I worked hard to prepare a fantastic presentation of HitMotion. On Friday, I had my 10 minutes of glory and pitched it via video call, and I could see that the overall audience number was around 15 people… I hoped for something more honestly, but with 15 people we can still hope there was some interested partner. The presentation went great and I think we did a good job in making it smooth, exhaustive, and also visually appealing!

There were various networking opportunities and also many interesting talks where developers gave pieces of advice about how to properly develop and market a game… unluckily I had not the time to enjoy these much because of the insane amount of work I am having these days. But from the description, they looked worth a watch.

Through the networking platform, I was also contacted by various people asking for possible collaborations or that wanted to hire me. This was also very positive.

All in all, I was satisfied by my experience at Devcom:

• It gave us of New Technology Walkers a reason to spend some days focusing on preparing a very good pitch for our game HitMotion: Reloaded, and so now we can present it better to interested partners and investors
• We had a few interesting meetings and some of them were with companies we would have never had the opportunity to meet if not for this event and its networking platform. We are now discussing about some possible collaborations, and even if in the end nothing will happen, having had these opportunities is already very positive:
• The PitchIt! event was fun and gave me adrenaline rush.

If the price of the ticket were a bit lower and there were more publishers interested in VR, it would have been perfect.

My experience as a VR blogger at Gamescom

We focused on Devcom most of the time because we were looking for business opportunities, but on the last day, I also gave a look at what was happening regarding VR at Gamescom. I had a press pass and was looking for interviews and demos about VR games. The harsh reality is that this Gamescom was not much about VR.

The online platform of Gamescom was not as good as the one of Devcom, and was just a directory of what was available at this event. I looked for “VR”, trying to discover all the virtual reality content available and… I just found two games o_O

I so tried looking for some special announcements on dedicated VR magazines (Upload, Road To VR, etc…) but I found literally nothing. With a wider Google search, I just found a few new like:

• The reveal of the launch date of Jurassic World: Aftermath Part 2 (September, 30rd)
• The reveal of the launch date of Rhythm of the Universe: Ionia (September, 23rd)
• The famous deadmau5 revealing Oberhasli: “a virtual reality game that will contain an ever-evolving world of music, environments, and other interactive content for players”

and that’s it. At such a big event, I was expecting something more, as it happened some years ago with the Gamescom VR Showcase. But honestly, I think it’s understandable: VR games must be experienced, they are not enough to be seen in a video, so for a VR game studio spending around 1000€ for a virtual booth where it can’t make people try its game is a bit nonsense. One of the good things about such events is making passers-by that maybe have never tried VR play your game and fall in love with it. With a virtual booth, this is not possible… maybe it can still be useful for games like Beat Saber that are cool to see also in videos, but not for our indie title. So it doesn’t surprise me that VR studios have not considered this event that much.

As part of the press, I was given a list of PR contacts of some of the important companies that were there. I e-mailed a dozen of them asking questions about VR and I haven’t received an answer from even one of them. With a physical event, it’s easy to talk with someone at the booth, while e-mails get easily lost in the pile. I remember when at Gamescom 2018 I was able to speak about AR and VR with the amazing devs behind World of Tanks just by visiting their booth… things like that happen more difficultly in an online event.

My experience as a VR content creator with Gamescom was a bit disappointing: I have to admit I have not dedicated too much time to it because of my focus on Devcom, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But again, this experience showed me that most of the gaming world is still not into VR. Remember what all the wisest people are saying: VR is still a niche, we are still in the “early days” of the technology. Our time will come, but we still need some years.

And that’s it with my experience with these two important gaming events. If you have been there, let me know what has been yours here in the comments! It would be interesting to chat about it together…

(Header image by Devcom)