Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

EA Games holding back on Virtual Reality … for now

By

ea games holding back on virtual reality for now eavr
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Since the release of the original Oculus Rift DK1 headset a few years ago, more and more game developers and publishers around the world have announced their intention to jump aboard the heavily hyped VR train. Surprisingly though, EA Games, one of the world’s largest gaming corporations, has been much more hesitant, and it has now said it won’t be jumping on to the bandwagon until it knows what the destination is.

For EA, it’s all about market size. If the uptake of VR is slow or minimal, competing in that space may be difficult, and it may be harder still to turn a profit.

Recommended Videos

“There’s some challenges still and I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market,” EA’s CFO, Blake Jorgensen said in a chat with GamesIndustry.biz. “We don’t make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough. The PS Vita — the Sony product — we don’t make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it’s all about the size of the market.”

Related

Related: VR will replace smartphones someday, predicts Oculus founder Palmer Luckey

Indeed as ground-breaking and exciting as virtual reality is, the current marketplace for those using VR hardware is in the low hundreds of thousands, and even that’s only if you factor in both Oculus Rift headsets and the Gear VR. While the commercial launch of virtual reality hardware next year will boost that to likely over a million units, no one knows if that will occur one month after launch, or a year after.

There will be quite a few hurdles and stumbling blocks to overcome in the early days of virtual reality, too. It’s a technology that has to be tried to be believed, and that limits its exposure. There is also the ever-improving, but still present issue of nausea, with some users experiencing stomach-sickness in poorly crafted games and experiences. That too many slow the adoption rate.

VR is also a restrictive technology locally, in that you can’t see anyone around you when using it. That’s fine when you are by yourself, but it removes much of the local-social elements that are possible with traditional console gaming.

Despite all of this, developers like Epic Games, Crytek, Ubisoft, and a number of other big names, not to mention a multitude of smaller ones, are all working on games and experiences that launch with or soon after commercial VR hardware. So they have been happy to take the jump.

Do you think EA’s hesitation will cause it be left behind in the early stages of the VR race?

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
Fortnite is coming back to iOS, but Epic Games still isn’t happy about it
Solid Snake aiming a pistol out of a box in Fortnite.

Fortnite is set to come back to iOS in Europe sometime in 2024. This will mark the first time a natively running version of Fortnite will be available on iOS since Apple removed the game from the App Store in 2020.

Apple did so at the time because Epic tried to use its own third-party payment system, kicking off a series of legal battles in an attempt to get Apple to open up its platform more. Although those legal battles have yielded mixed results for Epic, a newly passed Digital Markets Act in the European Union is forcing Apple to do things like "allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations" and "allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform."

Read more
The best games on Meta Quest 3
A product shot of the Meta Quest 3 shown in dramatic lighting over a gradient background.

VR headsets have become a successful niche for gamers who want to fully immerse themselves in their gaming experiences. There are plenty of options out there in terms of which headset you could go with, including Sony's PSVR2 and Oculus, but the latest and greatest is the Meta Quest 3. This is the upgraded version of the already impressive Quest 2, and it not only boasts more powerful hardware, but also new features that can add even more immersion to games. This headset is fresh on the market, so if you picked one up and are looking for the best games to test it out, we've collected the ones you should dive into.

Asgard’s Wrath II

Read more
The video game industry flew too close to the sun in 2023. Now, its crashing back to Earth
The crew of the Saints Row reboot stands against a wall.

For several years, some relevant mergers, acquisitions, or studio formations were happening in the video game industry every month. Companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Embracer Group went on shopping sprees, and studios many of us never expected to be acquired, like ZeniMax Media, Bungie, and Gearbox Entertainment, were respectively bought up. These companies seemed dead set on infinite growth, with no plans to stop. That tone changed throughout 2023.

Microsoft completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but only after an arduous legal process that enflamed the console wars, leaked information the industry historically kept secret, and forced Microsoft to deemphasize its cloud gaming efforts. Meanwhile, layoffs have rocked the industry, with the biggest culprit being Embracer Group, which has been shedding studios and workers ever since a deal meant to sustain its growth fell through. As 2023 wraps up, the game industry is in a much less bullish state than it was just 12 months ago, and the people paying for that are the developers who make the games.
Infinite growth
As with any industry, mergers and acquisitions have always been part of the game industry. That goes back to 1978, when Atari sold itself to Warner Communications. But over the last decade, as gaming has become much more accepted and relevant in the mainstream, the amount of deals and prices attached to them have only increased. Microsoft frequently invested in the game industry, peaking quantity-wise with the announcement of six studio acquisitions throughout 2018.

Read more