cyril guichard

We have a pretty nice portfolio so far! #VR #indiegamedev meta.com/experiences/pr…

@Nova_Assembly @REPLACEDGame Just purchased today! Outstanding work! <3

@REPLACEDGame store.steampowered.com/app/1663850/RE…

Nova Assembly’s first release sets the bar high. @REPLACEDGame , a narrative-driven cyberpunk thriller, is out today on PC and Xbox, including Game Pass. It embodies everything we stand for: bold ideas, distinct authorship, and uncompromising quality. Don’t miss it!

@Hero_Kvatch Drakkenridge could use some spotlight :) meta.com/experiences/dr…

What are some of your most anticipated VR games and undiscovered gems that you'd love to see in the next VRGS? Asking for a friend 👀

@noenmiturno1 @purplemikey @XocusVR Thanks! :) And glad you enjoyed the game!!!

@luxregina @purplemikey @XocusVR I'm proud to say I'm one of those two thousand. Great game!

This is really sad to hear. An amazing game and a fantastic development team. Rec Room has always been such a big part of VR. Honestly, if times like this are hitting the industry, what are small studios supposed to do?

@AlexSerpo10 @purplemikey @XocusVR @Zimtok5 I've reached out to all the people I knew with very little results... it's ok, we'll be moving on to other things :)

@luxregina @purplemikey @XocusVR Reach out to Zimtok 5 and maybe gt, zim would help show it off @Zimtok5

@AlexSerpo10 @purplemikey @XocusVR There will be no "next project": we can't afford to work 3 years and get no exposure or discovery of our title :(

@luxregina @purplemikey @XocusVR No idea you guys had another game out, loved stones of harlath, imagine if the horizon slop was never there at least then a chance if discovery was there, maybe now that it’s gone the next project will be better off.

@vr_rames Bah, c'est la vie... :) mais il est aussi clair qu'il n'y aura pas de nouveau titre VR de la part de Garage Collective :(

Je n'ai pu tester DrakkenRidge mais il me semble pourtant assez quali de ce que j'ai pu en entendre. Très triste d'apprendre qu'il s'est écoulé à moins de 2000 exemplaires...

@purplemikey @XocusVR But that's the conundrum: if everyone follows "what's hot", you get the same games again and again.... and small 3 man team studios don't have the marketing budget to break the exposure chokehold, therefore struggling with ROI (my time working == money)

@luxregina @XocusVR I know the quality and scale of your games. And I truly think its amazing for a 3 devs team. But it also is not exactly attacking the market of what's "hot". It's dedicated to your passion and the craft that you guys love. Which happens to be a niche in VR.

@purplemikey @XocusVR Garage Collective is smack-dab in what you are describing, and the only reason we are still alive is only because we all have full time jobs. Except Stones of Harlath, none of our sales could sustain 3 people :( ... Drakkenridge sold less than 2K copies....

@XocusVR I will say, the industry now belongs to 3-5 people studios, trying hard, shipping quick, finding what sticks and what doesn't without putting your studio on the line. So small studios are in a better place than ever.

Gave a small talk today in front of a LOT of people... quite stressful, but I was told it went well! :) Topic was how we handle a DESIGN, BUILD & SHIP philosophy at our school, both from a Game Dev, but also from an academic perspective!

@Gullie667 Not niche, not free to play, but same outcome: unfortunately DrakkenRidge bombed and most likely spelled the end of the VR adventure for Garage Collective... and the culprit is the same: the abyssal store visibility.

The cautionary tale of Super RC. Super RC started development when the Meta store was still curated and not yet dominated by free-to-play games. The original vision followed Ultrawings: a single-player game built around challenges (gates, obstacle courses) plus single and multiplayer racing. Then the store changed direction. Meta began aggressively pushing to make Horizon the winner. This buried everything else. That killed the revenue tail for Ultrawings 2 and many other titles. Soon afterward, free-to-play games took over. We kept building anyway, hoping our original design would rise to the top. A year later it was clear the challenges were simply too hard — especially for players new to RC cars. We debated killing the project multiple times. We didn’t. Sunk-cost fallacy, lack of funds for a new / comparable project, and a Meta contract that would get us to the finish line all played a role. So we pivoted hard: free-to-play with in-app purchases, racing focus, no challenges, added a track creator. A rush to early access. The game moved from 'new take on RC cars' to classic RC racing niche. (You can see the skeleton of the challenge system when you play the tutorial… or the sandbox mode as it currently exists.) A few months later Meta pivoted away from Mixed Reality and ended the contract. We finished our end anyway — 80–90% there and too cool to abandon. It came at a cost. We launched without an earnable currency system (sold vehicles piecemeal instead). Kids hated it: 'It should be free if you grind enough.' That mismatch helped cause Bit Planet Games to collapse post-launch. We should have known better than to build a niche racer. A paradigm shift occurred in the market. But we hoped free-to-play would broaden the audience. A big mistake: the game is too hard for the kid audience. And this is where the user base is. In general, new to RC players rarely succeed in a session or two. Skill takes time, but with no upfront cost there’s little reason to come back tomorrow. It’s a really good RC racer if you enjoy that kind of thing. I’d love to squash bugs and polish it into a full release, but the game isn’t generating money for further development. Unless something game-breaking appears, updates are unlikely. If I could backtrack (and making another niche game was a requirement) I would have kept it as a premium one-time purchase. Live and learn. I’m still really proud of it though. Bias acknowledged — I just love racing and RC cars. @VirtualReality @IndieGames @RCCars

@DevteamL When it's paid by others, GDC is GREAT fun... you get to walk in a city where pretty much any conversation in the street is about stuff you know...deeply. GREAT TALKS! If you pay on it on your own and go there for fun and casual connections, it's great. Otherwise, meh...

I don't know if I miss something? I'm not even talking about the US situation, it's just I feel a total disconnection. I always saw GDC as a financial burden. I have FOMO for many things, but GDC never has been one of.

@folaoftech You lost me a Javascript for back-end :)

Being hired as a female software developer🤣

The plight of a VR game dev. VR is gaming. No other app genre is mainstream. It's technically challenging to make VR games—VR games are way harder to make than flat games if you're making a game with real VR interactions. If your game is one where everything is OnTriggerEnter, your game is just a port of flat game mechanics. Sorry, but ports suck. VR games are way harder to make look good than flat games. Every person I have ever shown Ultrawings to—who had an interest in flying and who also had an interest in gaming—shared the same first comment: 'Yeah, but the graphics.' And sure, if you've played Battlefield or even Fortnite, it's an accurate assessment. Doesn't matter if the thing is wireless and portable. No extra credit is given. The best graphics are still terrible with few exceptions. Screenshot Alyx, stretch it across your full FOV—it looks worse. That's the high watermark, and it likely lost money. Batman might have been good but it isn't good-looking—unless you're grading on a curve. You're competing for time. A small group (me included) accepts the downsides for that one VR positive. Most stick with polished, better-looking flat games. VR is what? <3% of the market? So take a popular indie who does all the things right, like @SurrounDead. Consider that the game looks extremely indie yet has real-time lighting, shadows, and PBR materials. Multiply the sales by 0.03. Next add the complexity of making that game VR while optimizing the graphics. (You read that right... you will need to downgrade those graphics. No offense SurrounDead <3.) VR locomotion, VR hands, VR inventory, VR UI, VR driving controls, VR weapons, and VR character physics if the NPCs will react to your touch. All these things are major undertakings far beyond the flat analogue. Then make those systems work well together. Finally make that shit run on two 2K monitors at 72 FPS using mobile hardware. The above issues restrict a dev's ability to reach a minimum bar in terms of gameplay. So you have tons and tons of bad games. Bad games give bad impressions. What can help? Make it easier for the indie dev to make a game like that on a hardware platform that actually has a playerbase. This probably means a mobile headset, a compute puck with Nvidia 1080 performance, at less than $799. Which could be impossible. But I hope not.

@0liviergay @expedition33 Je ne suis pas juriste, mais j'etais dans la pub et j'ai bosse avec des avocats sur un cas similaire : Clair-obscur est un mot composite Francais (traduit de Chiaroscuro). Il est fort possible qu'un copyright ne puisse pas etre exerce dessus.

IMPORTANT Je viens de recevoir un courrier d'avocat de la part du jeu CLAIR OBSCUR @expedition33 de Sandfall Interactive, qui me somme d'arrêter de vendre ma BD éditée chez Drakoo intitulée Académie Clair-Obscur, censée surfer sur le succès incontestable du jeu. Bon. (1/X)

@Dilmerv @Dilmerv Should we connect? (here or on LinkedIn?) We have 3 games on your store (Stones of Harlath, Shock Troops and DrakkenRidge) and already are a managed dev, from the Start Era :)

📣 Today I’m excited to share an IMPORTANT update on where we’re headed with VR & Worlds. Over the past year, we’ve listened to feedback from developers and creators. One thing was clear: both communities needed more focus and clearer direction. Starting in 2026, VR & Worlds will operate as two distinct platforms: - VR is focused on third-party developers, with the Meta Horizon Store restructured around apps and games instead of Worlds. - Worlds is going mobile-first, with dedicated tools to build for mobile. We remain the largest investor in VR, and we’re building both platforms to support the long term success of our creator and developer communities. 📌 Read the full details in Samantha Ryan’s post developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/2…

Ain't that the point of "positive" rivalries? It didn't started as one, but after WWII, much of Europe got neutered, and what came out of it, is positive rivalry, like France and Britain, or Germany... It's fine: I love having rivals that are also friends: they drive me to a better self :)

@therryLeCon @NapoleonBonabot If a day comes where Britain stands but France falls, I would be willing to go to France in order to save you. I guess it is just in us to do such a thing. Yeah it is interesting, isn't it. We have unknowingly encouraged each other into progressing, but it's an unspoken reality.

Only the French are allowed to hate England btw. And only the English are allowed to hate the French. We are the greatest rivalry in history and no one else is allowed to be a rival to either of us.

Metal minis received, box prototype finished... Technomages has become much more of a reality! #boardgame #IndieGameDev

@BroksTricky @GMIgorSmirnov Because Knights were often horse-mounted in battle :)

@GMIgorSmirnov To represent a miter I suppose. I got another question, why do you call the piece with a horse head a "knight" in English? (Yeah, in Dutch we call it "paard" which literally means"horse" in Dutch).

I'm tired of pretending... What's this for?

@LifeArtStudios These studies are always quite swingy when it comes to small sample sizes (I do consider a 1000 respondents a small sample size)

@luxregina More than I thought

#VR #indiegame