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Ad Alternum has announced that its Kickstarter funding campaign for OrbusVR has exceeded its funding goal of $10,000 in under 24-hours. Originally seeking to secure $10,000, fans have already pledged over $22,000 with five days to go. The campaign was slated to run for only a week in an
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Towards the bottom of this bid:
"The largest risk that typically comes from an MMO project is simple: will it ever come to fruition?"
Indeed.
As a fan of VR tech I wish the team all the best.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Also they did not show what people were physically doing while playing the game. What do you actually do when playing? Are you standing, running around, sitting down, ect?
--John Ruskin
I haven't played this, but, I do question MMORPG tropes in the VR space. Can you imagine swinging your arms back and forth for several minutes to kill a single monster? Think about a world boss.
Perhaps you can spell it out for me; I can be relatively obtuse at times.
My "problem" with KS projects like this is that you are supposed to set a reasonable budget for what it is you hope to accomplish... at least it used to be this way in the early days of KS.
However, being an "all or nothing" platform, project designers have come to realize that the lower you set the bar the more likely you are to see at least some cash inflow. This tends to leave backers holding the stick when a project takes in enough to "succeed" on KS, but not enough to deliver all that is promised or envisioned.
Given a typical top tier MMO takes 50-100 million USD to make, and that any dev will tell you VR has its own added challenges (read: expenses) a KS project promising to deliver a VR MMO for a paltry $10,000 seems... odd.
That's all. As I mentioned above, I wish the devs (dev?) all the best, and I am a big believer in VR tech in general.
edit:
After some minimal digging I found under the FAQ that the creator feels $10k is "barely [] enough to make a Flappy Bird clone" but "represents an amount we think will make a materially positive impact on the game's development".
Draw from this what you will.
Hopefully Riley Dutton exhibits better mores than Ethan Casner.
edit2:
So... I get that PC VR has too limited an audience right now to warrant building a 100M dollar MMO from the "ground up"... maybe this project will turn out to be a golden egg after all. Just wanted to end on a positive note.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
I imagine they were simply afraid to ask for very much, given how few followers they actually have. I'm sure they took a basic measure from forum/website visits and attention paid to articles on gaming sites and decided to lowball it.
While I think asking $10k was incredibly low, and probably a bit too conservative, I think it's working out alright. I think they should have gone for a longer duration on the KS, though, and advertised it a bit more.
Still, $30k+ in a week for such a tiny, tiny obscure game isn't a bad boost for them, especially if we consider that they really weren't desperately seeking funding.
The game won't be super deep and complex. But, it'll hit a nice empty void in the market for people who want a VR MMO.
My biggest gripe with this, and most VR games still, is the horrible movement schemes everyone is still using. By that, I mean the teleporting around to move.
Success stories in VR so far have been cases where games will add in VR support (eg RE7) alongside marketing to the traditional PC gaming segment. Some games seem to have done really well with this model.
So... at this point in time, while I agree that yes a room scale VR MMO built from the ground up for VR could be a very cool thing, the end result may not be what many people are hoping for.
Other games that already have a significant content base seem to be doing just fine in VR, including at least one MMO. We'll see what an exclusive PC VR MMO title brings at this juncture, I suppose.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance