Facebook’s Oculus Rift may currently be lagging some of its virtual-reality headset rivals in sales, but the company says that some individual games are doing pretty well in its ecosystem.
“Multiple titles have made more than $1m in the Oculus Store alone,” Oculus VR head of content Jason Rubin told Road to VR last week.
This follows an announcement from digital store Steam’s parent company Valve early this year, claiming that more than 30 games had made more than $250k from its store.
‘Games’ is the key word here however: it’s gaming that is currently pulling in most of the dollars in virtual reality, rather than other kinds of experience including music.
Top performer Job Simulator, which passed $3m in sales by the end of 2016, is emblematic of a market still focused (in a business sense) mainly on games.
However, Oculus – like rivals – is investing in various kinds of content to pave the way for other categories to start making money too.
Last October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company had invested $250m in original VR content, with another $250m to come. In May this year, Rubin said that $50m of the latter would “exclusively fund non-gaming, experiential VR content”.
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