A year ago people were just starting to explore Oculus Touch and the feeling of bringing your hands into a virtual world with the Oculus Rift.
HTC Vive beat Touch to market by about eight months with hand controllers, and SteamVR launched with a ton of innovative experiences including Fantastic Contraption, Tilt Brush and Job Simulator. When Oculus Touch launched in December 2016, much of the innovation seen on Steam came to the Oculus Store alongside a number of exclusives like The Climb, Dead & Buried, Medium and Quill. In 2017 there’s been a major content release each month. In addtion Facebook got aggressive with pricing and made Rift at least $200 cheaper than Vive, when accounting for things like an extra sensor or integrated audio.
The person in charge of charting out that exclusive Oculus release calendar is Jason Rubin, the VP of Content at Oculus. We sent him some questions recently looking back at the first year of Oculus Touch and he offered some notable insights. We asked him, for instance, about some of the biggest releases of the year being adaptations from existing games — Skyrim, Fallout, LA Noire. None of those titles are carried on the Oculus Store and we wondered whether we would see more ports arriving in 2018.
“I won’t discount the possibility, but I think games made for VR are far more immersive and use more of the Touch controller’s capabilities,” Rubin wrote back to us. We followed that by asking what his dream franchise would be for Rift and Touch.
“I love Skyrim, but my goal is to see a made-for-VR MMO on our platform,” he wrote. “That will be a killer app.”
During our many hours in Skyrim over the last few weeks we’ve thought about how incredibly cool it would be if the world was populated by real people exploring the vast landscape alongside us. Matching up the depth of a game like Skyrim with a massively multiplayer virtual world would likely translate into a pretty incredible experience. Rubin noted that in the future they will be “turning towards deeper titles” and there won’t be an Oculus Studios title each month in 2018.
