luckys-taleOculus VR have, since the beginning of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter rollercoaster, stated that without good content, VR wouldn’t achieve launch velocity. They put their money where their mouth was back in February when they announced they’d be co-publishing CCP Games’ made-for-VR space combat game EVE Valkyrie as a flagship title. Now, the company has announced the next title to receive the published-by-oculus seal of approval and it’s called Lucky’s Tale.

The title is apparently an adventure game that’s built from the ground up for virtual reality and the Oculus Rift and is being developed by a company called ‘Playful’. Little else is known about the new game and it’s doubtful we can glean much from Playful’s previous title ‘Words with Friends’, a multi-player scrabble clone – which is apparently extraordinarily popular amongst the social-network fuelled casual gaming arena. Whatever the game turns out to be, it’s great to see Oculus continuing their drive for great, made for VR content to push their Rift platform. It perhaps gives us a glimpse as to where Oculus see their revenue coming from in the long term, given their pledge to try and sell their VR Headset hardware as cheaply as possible.

Paul Bettner, founder of Playful says of the venture “Virtual reality — I mean truly accurate, comfortable virtual reality — is the most important thing to happen to interactive entertainment in decades”. We’re not going to argue with him.

Moar Recruits!

John Holtman, Oculus VR's new Head of Platform
John Holtman, Oculus VR’s new Head of Platform

Frankly, if more than a couple of days passes without more news of Oculus hiring some talented individual, we start to feel restless. So, inevitably, Oculus have announced that they’ve hired the super talented Jason Holtman. Jason is yet another Valve veteran, one who helped pioneer digital game distribution back when DRM was a filthy term amongst PC gamers. Jason helped make Valve’s Steam platform a reality and joins Oculus as their ‘Head of Platform’.

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Given Holtman’s CV and the somewhat non specific nature of his new job title, it may well be that he’s joined Oculus to help them build their own digital distribution platform. Oculus states that he’ll be “..building the world’s best developer and player VR ecosystem”. Sounds as if Oculus are positioning themselves for world domination, or at the very least to build an incredible developer publishing portal for gamers to consume VR titles from.

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Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • snake0

    Gross not another abomination like Steam stealing all my processor cycles when I’m trying to jack in to the Matrix.

  • Tim Suetens

    They put their money where there mouth was
    They put their money where there mouth
    They put their money where there
    They put their money where
    They put their money
    They put their
    .
    .
    .
    THEIR!!!!!1!!!

    • Paul James

      I refer the honourable gentleman to 100s of previous articles where I got that distinction right every time. Thanks for the impotent grammar rage though. ;)