Blair Renaud // LOW-FI 🟥🟧⬛@Anticleric
The state of LOW-FI and platform support (Death of PCVR):
When the Kickstarter ran back in, the main focus was "Next-Gen VR", meaning at the time PCVR, with high hopes for PSVR2 (which hadn't been officially announced).
During the next year or so, we (myself, @NoahRayburnXR and @MarkSchrammVR) focused purely on supporting PC VR hardware. Rift/S, Vive, Index (including controllers), all WMR devices, etc... Mark even added HOTAS and Leap Motion support.
BUT, as I'm sure you know, PCVR has been in decline since around the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, which @AntonHand so eloquently called the punctuation mark on the gravestone of PCVR. The Rift store is a ghost town.. like officially.. even according to Meta, Viveport (lets not even go there), what else we got? WMR Store? Was that even a thing?
Anyway...
Lucky for us, PSVR2 was just over the horizon and we had the dev kits! How well is PSV2 doing though? Guess is (based on speaking with other top VR devs), not that great...
Somewhere in there, the great and powerful Noah Rayburn was able to implement a pretty slick "non-VR mode" upon my request to be able to test the game without having to keep taking the HMD off and on while balancing controllers on my knees and working with janky Quest link stuff.
Good news! Non-VR mode is great! No just for testing, but for playing. We decided to go full in on it's development and offer it to the consumers. Bonus, it also runs on Steam Deck! (See video below).
Now as we gear up to finish the game and run out of money (hopefully in that order), I'm thinking a lot about the market for the game and our placement in it. We have a decent amount of wishlists (66k on Steam and 24k on PS5) so far.
Hope is that launching as a PSVR2 title will capture a good chunk of those users, pushing it up on the general PSN store ranking (notoriously hard for indies to do otherwise), and we'll make some sales to traditional flat PS5 gamers as well. Snowballing a bit if we're lucky.
Steam launch could do decently well if timed properly, with hopes of the same "VR first" snowballing effect.
Why am I telling you all of this? I just thought it would be good to get it in writing and have a place to point. We are starting to run low on money (PCVR presales have basically dried up), so it's also to let you know that the fire is lit under my ass to ship this thing. That said, it won't ship until its good and done.
A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.
Oh, and before you say "Why not port it to Quest", put down the pipe. I understand that you're not a developer, but take my word for it, that's not happening. Not with this budget(or lack thereof), this sized team , or this generation of devices.
Ok. that's it. My longest twitter post.
PC/PCVR Preorder and early access: anticleric.itch.io/low-fi
Steam Wishlist
store.steampowered.com/app/395830/LOW…
PSN Wishlist
store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/… ❤️🧡💙🖤