VR gaming checked in China as studios wait for cheaper headsets and device makers eye content candy
Development of VR industry in China has been stalled by a chicken-and-egg dilemma
When Yang Yang, a former filmmaker, established his virtual reality (VR) game studio If Games in 2014 in Beijing, he found himself alone in a nascent field.
“Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 and DK2 were the only VR headsets out there, and inputs were nowhere to be found,” he said, referring to some of the early prototype headsets developed by Facebook-owned Oculus VR.
But Yang did not have to wait long for the VR scene to become crowded, with Shanghai-based Vsensory and Shenzhen-based Multiverse entering the field alongside a number of labs funded by China’s internet titans, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
Over the past few years, Yang has produced a string of successful games, including zombie shooter Fastigium, which people can be seen playing in VR game centres across China. The studio is currently developing Ghost, a fully-immersive cyberpunk game that will launch in August.
However, Yang says the industry has thinned dramatically in the past year as new upstarts who thought they could make a quick buck by joining the bandwagon have struggled to make money.
The number of deals in China’s VR industry in 2016 jumped nearly threefold to 178 from 60 in the previous year, with more than 4.98 billion yuan (US$767 million) raised, according to a 2017 report by a VR committee under the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The number of deals dropped to 71 in 2017 though, according to data collected by industry news site VR Tuoluo.