Oculus Rift getting the most support from VR game developers

It's hard to make someone wearing VR goggles look cool, but this person pulls it off. 

Kyle Orland 

Further ReadingAs new, high-end virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus, Valve/HTC, and Sony prepare to hit the market in the coming months, potential buyers may rightly wonder which VR solution is most likely to get a critical mass of support from the game development community. A new survey released ahead of March's Game Developers Conference suggests that, so far, the Oculus Rift is drawing outsized interest from those developers. 



GDC's 2016 State of the Industry Report surveyed 2,000 professional developers who attended the popular annual trade show during the past three years, asking about their current work and interest in various virtual reality and augmented reality technologies (among other things). The Oculus Rift was by far the most popular VR headset among the surveyed developers, with 19 percent of respondents saying they were currently working on a game for the device. A number of Rift competitors were well behind in a statistical dead heat for second place among active VR developers: Samsung's GearVR at 8 percent of respondents, Google Cardboard at 7 percent, and HTC Vive and PlayStation VR at 6 percent each. 



The Rift's lead extends to respondents' thoughts about the platform for their next VR game project; 20 percent say it will be on the Rift, compared to 9 percent for PlayStation VR and 8 percent for the HTC Vive. 

Before Oculus backers get too excited, it's worth pointing out that the Rift was still beaten out in the survey by the 25 percent of respondents who said they "are not currently interested in developing for VR/AR headsets." A further 44 percent said they weren't currently working on VR or AR games at the moment but were at least open to the idea of working on VR games. 

The Rift's lead in active VR game development might also merely be an outgrowth of developers' generally larger familiarity with Oculus' headset. A full 77 percent of developers in the survey said they had tried the Oculus Rift, compared to just 46 percent for Google Cardboard, 31 percent for GearVR, 21 percent for PlayStation VR, and 19 percent for the HTC Vive. As developers become more aware of the Rift's competition, those platforms may begin to see more developers actively working on them. 

Overall, the survey shows increasing numbers of game developers think consumer-grade virtual reality is more than a quickly passing fad this time around. A full 75 percent of respondents said that VR/AR "is a long-term sustainable business to be in," and 86 percent said such headsets will be in at least 10 percent of US households by 2030. That doesn't mean those developers see VR taking over the entire gaming world, though: only 27 percent of respondents said they thought virtual reality headsets would ever surpass the roughly 40 percent of US households that currently have a traditional video game console.