‘Resident Evil Requiem’ Already Has a VR Mod, But You Should Probably Wait

TL;DR: It depends on the game and game engine, but with only a few percent of gamers using VR, even low costs may not be recouped; it is often smarter to just let a 3rd party create an unofficial VR mods, so the original developer won't be responsible for quality issues with the resulting experience, while still benefiting from additional sales to VR users.

Adding VR modes to existing games only works under certain circumstances. Unreal Engine is optimized for first person shooters and comes with a very capable character controller that is VR capable by default, flat developers just don't use these features. But they are still there, which is what allows UEVR to pick up these always available hooks and make most UE games playable in VR.

Capcom added VR capabilities to their RE Engine for RE8 and RE4, which most likely means they are also available in all games using that engine, which allowed modders to retroactively enable it for RE9 within just a few days. The REFramework by Praydog mentioned in the article basically plugs into a standard structure, which of course reduced the effort a lot.

Adding VR gets a lot more complicated without such standard hooks to connect to. For example Unity games rarely use the limited default character controller, but there are widely used ones like Opsive's "Ultimate Character Controller" that are VR capable, and most Unity games can be modified rather easily. There are other games using custom engines where you'd basically have to rewrite large parts of the game to add VR, which will never see VR mods. So it depends on the game.

For the cost for adding a VR mode we could look at a much easier scenario, adding a VR mode to a game still in development. Let's take a RE9 VR mode for PSVR2 as sort of the ideal case:

– Capcom already added VR support to RE Engine.
– They already released RE4/8 with full PSVR2 support, so their team/designers/artists/developers already have experience with adding VR and optimizing for it in a hybrid game.
– The game can already be played in first person, with usually rather slow motion, and most of it taking place inside, all great for VR.
– ETFR on PSVR2 offers a VR specific performance boost to compensate for the higher render load in VR from higher resolution, higher frame rate and stereoscopy, saving Capcom lots of optimization.

What would still add cost?
– Increasing details on (some) models and textures, because people playing in VR tend to explore and examine objects closely by holding them close to their face.
– Extra checks for boundaries, because VR gamers can move more freely and thus can end up in walls or areas they shouldn't be. You cannot walk through a wall with a controller, but you can take a step sideways in your living room, taking you on the other side.
– Adapted level design, usually placing more objects that players can pick up and interact with, and extra cues because it is harder to predict where the player is looking or standing.
– A lot more game testing to cover all this, because the extra movement options in VR are much harder to limit than a character effectively moving on a 2D plane with a fixed camera height, and easily stopped by a small box.
– A lot of small stuff.

Let's guess that these extras would add about 10% to the game development costs for Capcom. It would be more expensive for others that first would have to implement the features in their engine and have no experience with VR modes yet. Taking the "10M units" from Microsoft, naïvely 10% higher costs would mean it has to sell 10% more, so 1M extra copies just because it also supports VR.

Let's also simplify by assuming that PSVR players buy the same amount of VR games as PlayStation players buy flat games, so the percentage of HMD owners indicates extra sales. I'll use PS4 and PSVR1 because we only have numbers for these, even though an RE9 VR mode would only make sense on PS5/PSVR2.

Sony sold around 140M PS4 (incl. Pro), 5M PSVR1 by 2020, so let's say 7M total for a 5% share of the user base, which would be a lot higher than the active VR users share on Steam. Spinning this further, 5% PSVR1 owners would buy 5% extra copies to play in VR. So if adding a VR mode costs 10%, this won't pay for Capcom. And again, Capcom is already in the almost perfect position to do this at low costs on PSVR2.

Now obviously modders achieve VR support without needing 10% of the game development budget. But that's because they don't add hires textures, change levels, hire play testers or modify game engines. They also don't optimize the code to deal with the much higher performance requirements. They basically hook into existing functionality, try to circumvent some game breaking issues or things that make it hard to use, like menu placement, but this also uses existing functionality. And it is up to the user to buy hardware capable to deal with the much higher requirements.

Now Capcom could of course do the same, basically just flip a switch and release the flat game as is with an experimental VR mode that does the same as the 3rd party mods, at minimal cost. But they probably won't do this, because while VR users would probably be happy about that, it would nonetheless lead to lots of criticism about the lack of polish and overall bad state. If this would significantly up the system requirements, like requiring a PS5 Pro or at least an RTX 3080 on PC, this would again significantly lower the unit sales, making it less profitable, and no doubt lead to a shitstorm about lacking optimizations.

The problem is always the low VR user numbers of less than 5% of the flat gamers on the same platform. If Capcom wanted to prevent people from trying to play any of their Resident Evil games with VR mods on PC, they could pretty easily remove the required hooks, making it way harder or impossible for modders to add VR support. Apparently Capcom didn't do that, so while they will not add a full feature VR mode due to the costs vs. low extra sales, and not offer a mod-like minimal effort VR option either due to the reputational damage this could cause, they will let others pick up what they implemented and enable the function nonetheless. That's fine for them because this is no longer Capcom's responsibility, but that of gamers and modders. And it may still sell some extra copies.

In early 2025 John Carmack posted on X that he personally offered Microsoft a USD 1M minimum sales guarantee for allowing Teem Beef to ship the official game files for Doom and Quake directly from the Horizon Store with Team Beef's engine ports, instead of asking users to buy the flat games on Steam and manually transfer the game files. This was only a legal question, nothing would have changed technically, as all this already worked. It would only have made it easier for Quest users to buy the games, which would have resulted in more profit for Microsoft.

They still said no, and most likely for exactly the same reasons. The moment they get officially involved, things that go wrong would fall back onto them, whether justified or not, tainting their precious IP. By just doing nothing, and still letting Team Beef create the ports, and still letting users transfer the game files, they might have sold a few extra copies less due to people shying away from the hassle. But people would still buy and play Doom and Quake on Quest, even if the numbers were way below what Microsoft requires to even lift a finger. Simply not stopping modders is a win for both Microsoft and Capcom without any of the costs or risks that would come with releasing official VR ports or modes.