Jeff Hilbert hävdar att VR just nu rider på en unik trendvåg

När tekniken först introducerades fanns enorma förhoppningar på virtual reality, där vissa såg tekniken som nästa stora steg framåt för spel och interaktivitet. VR lyfte dock aldrig och hämmades under flera år av dyra modeller och tekniska lösningar som gjorde formatet otillgängligt för majoriteten av spelarna. Meta Quest försökte lösa många av dessa problem genom att erbjuda en billigare och trådlös upplevelse, men det fanns fortfarande ett annat bekymmer: spelutvecklare lyckades bara sporadiskt skapa titlar som motiverade en investering i den fortfarande ganska nischade VR-plattformen.

Men kan det vara på väg att förändras? Under vårt besök på DevGAMM pratade vi med veteran-vd:n Jeff Hilbert, där samtalet gled över till VR och varför han nu vill investera i och utforska området ytterligare. Jeff Hilbert sade:

"No, I never bought into VR and AR 10 years ago. I started buying in two years ago, and I'm buying in more and more, even now as we're hearing everything from Meta, because I'm simply watching the numbers."

Om varför han nu har ändrat uppfattning berättade Hilbert följande:

"Well, Google doesn't share, Meta doesn't share, but you can kind of pick up ancillary numbers by watching the market and watching that, 'oh, they're doing a sequel'. You're looking at it like, 'oh, they just did an update'. That's an expensive update. Then you can kind of look at the content they're doing, part of this is being in the game industry, they must be generating a lot more revenue than we think.

So the market segmenting, everybody was trying to do VR, and there just weren't a lot of good VR games. They just weren't good, they weren't interesting, they weren't good. The cameras are getting better, people are learning how to... people are getting more comfortable wearing them. So there's just a whole thing that's happening. There's a zeitgeist happening with VR right now where people are getting more comfortable wearing them. The headsets are getting lighter, the fidelity is going up, and people are really learning how to make the games for it, for a better experience. And that's it.

It's very interesting because people were talking with me about, 'I don't think VR is going to make it. I'm not ready for VR. We're not ready for it'. And then all of a sudden, when everyone is saying the industry is going down, I'm like, I'm in."

Avslutningsvis utvecklade Hilbert också varför vi bör hålla ögonen på vad Meta gör och hur företaget driver sin VR- och metaverse-division:

"Money is coming from somewhere because VCs are not investing in this anymore, so they have to be doing it out of cash flow, and to do that update out of cash flow, it's selling. So that's my metric that I'm focusing on right now."

Se hela intervjun med Hilbert nedan, där vi även pratar om adaptioner, hur miljardvarumärken byggs på budgetar runt 20 miljoner dollar och mer därtill.