Job Simulator was one of the big surprises in virtual reality in the past year. The VR title from Owlchemy Labs generated more than $3 million in revenue as a launch title on the HTC Vive.
The game was a hilarious cartoon-style experience where you perform various routine jobs like being a short order cook or an office worker in VR. Its success enabled Owlchemy to be one of the few early examples of how to succeed in VR game development.
I talked with Alex Schwartz, CEO of Owlchemy Labs, the creator of Job Simulator for the HTC Vive and other VR platforms. We spoke at the DICE Summit, the elite game industry event in Las Vegas. Job Simulator was nominated for an award at the DICE Awards, the Oscars of gaming.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GB: What have you guys said about how well Job Simulator has done? What kind of impact has it had?
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Above: Alex Schwartz, CEO of Owlchemy Labs, maker of Job Simulator. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
Alex Schwartz: It’s been surprising, a lot of the superlatives for Job Simulator. We announced our revenue, that we’ve surpassed $3 million in sales for Job Simulator last year. We’re seeing incredible pickup from people who have the ability to show a performance of themselves inside the game – YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Facebook Live, things like that.
People didn’t expect how much of a spectator sport VR would be. That was one of our early decisions when we were building. We thought that owners of year one VR hardware — PlayStation VR, Vive, Oculus – would not be the primary users of the hardware. It would be passing it off to friends and family. VR parties where people come over because they’re rare in the early days, in the relative scheme of things. We tried to build a game where you didn’t have to give a whole backstory about how to use it, what the controls are. You could just hand it to a friend and say, “Go nuts.” They can get the story through the world-building, the environmental storytelling. They don’t have to learn a lot to get into it.
We’ve been getting a bunch of awards. Obviously we had the DICE nomination. The Unity awards, Sundance. There’s been quite a few. It’s been awesome to see. It’s funny. It starts off when you tell people the name and the concept. There’s this expectation mismatch between that point – “Wait, why do I just want to do a job?” – and then when you play it and come out and realize it’s a ton of fun. It was a fun uphill battle in a sense. If you offer something with guns or going into space, that makes sense in the early days of VR. “I want to go to a fantastic world!” People don’t normally think it would be fun to throw a stapler or eat a donut, but it turned out that everyone seems to love it.
GB: You made some choices, knowing what would happen with VR in year one. You knew it wasn’t going to be a gigantic blockbuster.
Schwartz: I don’t think it was a size thing. It was more, “What is the use case in year one?” It’s not a 40-hour game where you’re going to continuously explore a story and pick it up over several sessions. A more mature platform would have that gameplay loop. We wanted that pass and play, instant pickup, smooth onboarding, family friendly, focus on the highest quality graphics. We wanted an art style that’s not too demanding on the GPU, so we could push it up in resolution to get nice crisp edges.
Our predictions were that, for the units that were out there, they’d get a lot of use on a per-person basis. It wouldn’t just be “my” headset. It would belong to everyone in my circles of friends and family. I’ve heard so many stories from friends and colleagues and on Twitter. “Everyone in the neighborhood is here today to try high-end VR.” I think that ended up coming true.
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Source: Venturebeat