Scaling VR Adoption Without VR
It’s been a year since I last wrote about platforms and community building in the emerging VR medium. In that period we’ve seen major headset releases from Oculus, HTC, Playstation and Google, yet penetration remains low at 6 figures to ~1 million each. Aside from high price and comfort issues, perhaps the most glaring detractor is the lack of killer apps. But it’s also here where you’re starting to see a silver lining (vrlfg is a great resource for Steam VR stats): the VR apps with the highest engagement are all social, multiplayer experiences, whether mini sports games in Rec Room, shooters like Onward, Raw Data or Smashbox Arena, VR club nights in TheWaveVR (new portfolio company!), or playing games virtually with friends in BigScreen. You’re seeing a subset of consumers spending 30+ minutes in these social worlds. Clearly a lot more iteration will be needed to bring these up to non-VR benchmarks; stating the obvious, this is a key challenge and opportunity for VR.
Scaling adoption is a critical question mark in many VCs’ view that it’s still too early to invest in VR. The latest version I’ve heard is “let’s wait till summer when more utilization data comes out from the holiday hardware sales.” For the entrepreneur especially, this seems at odds against the tremendous efforts and dollars being spent by hardware platforms and brands around developer relations and advertising. The disconnect is that this macro market shift isn’t in your control. How do you as an entrepreneur spur exposure to your product to non-VR users directly, on your own?
Leveraging existing video platforms can go a long way towards addressing this. The consumers are already on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, etc. watching hours of content a day from their favorite influencers and streamers. The platforms and streamers both want fresh and differentiated content and shows. A two-pronged approach of working with them to try your content in VR and giving them a way to broadcast said experience on their existing video channels can get you meaningful exposure to a huge audience.
As an example, one of our portfolio companies VREAL recently launched their first show with HyperRPG on Twitch. Tune in every Friday at 4:30pm PST to watch Pamela and Ify judge guest streamers on their virtual surgery performance in Surgeon Simulator VR. It’s still early, but we are already seeing 3–4x the concurrent views and chat volume compared to the average HyperRPG show. For the streamer, the difference is just one extra person controlling virtual cameras alongside the player.
As well, the team launched a second show with Rooster Teeth (9M+ subscribers, 4B+ views) on YouTube. Having grown up playing Halo and watching RoosterTeeth’s classic Red vs. Blue shorts (longest running web series, 15 seasons and counting), this is one I’ve been waiting and holding my breath for.
Having both these professional streamer groups involved not only provided much broader audience exposure, but sped up tremendously the product iteration cycle for the team. No feedback quite equal to that from power users being given a flexible new toy to play with. To take a deeper dive on all things shared and live in VR, check out this talk that happened at our Upfront Summit by Todd, CEO of VREAL.
