The Next Steps for FOO
We’ve been working on The FOO Show for more than a year now, and during that time, we’ve learned more than I can really recount here. But our main goals have remained essentially unchanged. We think VR represents the start of a platform that will ultimately be as important as television, the personal computer, and smartphones. We believe that people will want to be entertained and informed in VR, just like they are with television and their phones. We believe that the analogs to television shows must take full advantage of the medium — they must be interactive, living worlds that surprise and delight viewers as they explore. Finally, we believe that the tools to create these shows need to be simple and inexpensive enough for any creator to use. You shouldn’t need a massive budget to make awesome virtual reality.
What we’re building isn’t television, a video game, or YouTube. It takes the best parts of those things and more, then combines them, Voltron-style, into a new medium that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
We’re finally ready to show you exactly what we’re talking about. We’ll have new episodes of The FOO Show starting in December, with two episodes a month following in subsequent months.
I know we’re late releasing this first season of the show and I take full responsibility for the delay. When we released the preview episode in the spring, I expected to fund The FOO Show (and other shows) using money from venture capitalists. But after talking to many potential partners, it felt like the VCs wanted us to be something we aren’t, or at least something we couldn’t be before virtual reality as a whole matured a whole lot more. I didn’t want to compromise our core vision and risk killing this new medium before it had a chance to get started.
After giving it a great deal of thought and consulting with many people, I decided I’d rather FOO stay small and scrappy, at least for the time being. Instead of raising a big round, we raised a little money from friends and family, and redoubled our efforts on the work. The bad news is that the scrappy approach meant we couldn’t hire the additional people we’d need to work in parallel. Instead it forced us to tackle tasks one at a time. Everything took longer than we expected.
So, where are we now? Today, we’re launching pre-sales for the first season of The FOO Show on Kickstarter. The first episode is already shot and we have two more episodes in varying stages of production. We’re in talks with several developers to fill the last few slots this season with more kick ass games.
Our tool chain is mature enough now that we’re confident we can shoot and post episodes on a bi-monthly schedule without problems using the team we have today, and we’re in the middle of putting the finishing touches on our client, which will work like an online video service — you’ll be able to browse between different shows, select and buy episodes, control playback, and more.
Yes, I said “buy episodes”. We’re charging people for the show. When we started out, I wanted to be able to make The FOO Show available to everyone for free. I’m disappointed that we weren’t able to make that happen, but at the end of the day, I’d much rather be working hard for you, the viewers, than venture capitalists or advertisers.
If you’re interested in buying the first season of The FOO Show, you can get it on Kickstarter right now. (If you want to see a demo, check out our preview episode. It’s free on Oculus Home and Steam). We’re ready to push the first episode live as soon as we collect fulfillment information from backers, after the campaign closes in December. In the meantime, we’re going to finish work on the client and shoot more episodes while the campaign is live.
As for pricing, the Kickstarter backer price of $20 will be the cheapest way to get the whole season at launch. If you’d rather buy the show on an episode-by-episode basis once you know which games we’re featuring, that’s fine too. You can buy standalone episodes when the show is released. But, I’d encourage you to check out the Kickstarter. We have some awesome schwag, and a few one-of-a-kind experiences, that will be exclusive to this Kickstarter. If you want more FOO in your life, head over to Kickstarter.
As always, feel free to post any questions in the comments here or hit me up on Twitter. I’ll answer as many as I can. Thanks for your support, and we hope you enjoy the show!
