Alphas & Betas
OrbusVR has fully funded on Kickstarter
OrbusVR, the blocky indie VR sandbox from Ad Alternum, has finished out its Kickstarter successfully this morning.
The studio had originally promised a brief, one-week Kickstarter with only a $10,000 goal, which backers met within four hours of launch. It sails to the finish line today with over 500 backers and $34,000 raised, which covers stretch goals including a pet companion system, extra world boss, and the Explorer's League faction, falling just shy of an additional battle discipline (like the Monk or Shaman). The Kickstarter money is intended to buffer the game's existing funding, not pay for the whole game.
OrbusVR is being built for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift as a full-scale MMORPG with all the basics — questing, combat, open-world zones, group content, and crafting — plus more unusual features like hybrid instanced dungeons, hidden and "feat" quests, player bounties, tiered safety zones for PvP, and a nifty compass system, the last of which was previewed over the weekend. Raiding won't make it in for launch.
"Thank you for your support through this process, it's been an amazing validation of the hard work our team has been putting in over the last year while we got the game ready for you to play," Ad Alternum's Riley Dutton wrote on Kickstarter.
Alpha is expected to begin on April 20th.
Source: Kickstarter
ad alternum
ad alternum game studios
orbusvr
riley dutton
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Arktouros
Looking forward to their next open beta day.
MesaSage
Good for them. They learned from Wall Street. Lower expectations until you get buyers and then tell the street you "beat" expectations. Then, watch the pop. Seriously, though, I hope they do well.
deekay_000
with vr headset sales for pc doing poorly i wonder how viable an mmo of all things would be financially in the current market conditions.
i also can't imagine how much fun it would be to grind for hours with one of those things sitting on my head strapped to my face.
if they do the motion controls on top of that it just adds to teh fatigue factor that generall doesn't play well with mmo design cliches.
The headsets are, actually, all doing quite well for where the headset makers expected them to be. All companies, sort of Oculus which hasn't said anything, have all reported being very happy with not only the initial sales of VR but also the new user adoption rate they've been getting. No technology is an overnight success and expecting it to be so, or claiming it would be, is absurd.
Playing games in VR can be tiring without a doubt. I wouldn't want to do something like some BDO 10 hour marathon grind session each day in VR but going at it for a couple of hours usually isn't too bad. I actually like it tremendously because my day job keeps me seated in front of a computer all day, so it's nice to get up and move around while still doing something fun.
sounds like they are trying to ward off investor panic with the statements i've read from them.
and either way they just have plain sold poorly bottom line. which means poor sales for software for them. which can't expect every headset owner to buy every game for them.
i can't imagine doing the kind of actions that full vr motion controls entails for a full 2 hours. that sort of thing was common complaint of the wii and kinect.
Statements like how PSVR after 4 months have sold over 900,000 units of 6 month estimate of 1 million units sold? Yeap, better get ahead of that impending meeting your stated target goals.
Even then in the last topic on this when you erroneously claimed Valve wasn't making any more games, and I pointed out the 3 VR games that they are making (as in Valve is actually making, not sending elsewhere) I linked you a full video where in addition to them saying that Vive sales are on track and have shown nothing but constant growth so far in addition they went on a big rant about how they weren't afraid to fail which is something no investor would ever want to hear (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/valves-gabe-newell-vr-could-turn-out-to-be-a-complete-failure/)
It isn't that bad, and I'm out of shape as all get out. That said I don't think VR will become this catch-all entertainment solution that you will always be plugged into for all your entertainment needs. Watching a 360 Video is amazing but it doesn't make 2D video any less entertaining, either. That said we've gone about as far as we can go with keyboard and mouse. Changing the way we interact with our entertainment is the next logical step in creating new forms of entertainment.
Lights and Music
Statements like how PSVR after 4 months have sold over 900,000 units of 6 month estimate of 1 million units sold
You sound like someone pushing a 3D TV in 2013. Sure this is the brand new thing people are talking about now, but come see me in 3 years and we can talk about the difference between initial success and actual stability/adoption into society. Launch hype sales numbers do not equal long-term success, as has been pointed out by a multitude of studies on VR. Maybe it'll make it, maybe it won't – most VR publicists seem to be saying it will, while most people watching the market are skeptical.
Feel free to buy whatever you want, but I couldn't be happier I didn't buy a 3D TV in 2012/2013 when they were all the rage, and I'm definitely not about to buy a glorified VirtualBoy now
I sound like someone stating the facts as they are. A lot of people like to chime in about how terrible VR is doing but they have no real numbers to back up their claims. Like your "multitude of studies on VR" lol what? Please, I'd love to see your multitude of studies. Please.
In fact these aren't talking about "launch hype sales" because if you rewind back to November and December last year there were all kinds of articles up speculating that VR was DOA (good ol' reliable source that SuperData is). Yet here we are a few months later and they're getting close towards their initial sales goals. Valve has stated steady user growth a year after launch.
As someone who grew up in the 80's and 90's you don't need to talk to me about failed technologies because I've seen them all. However as I literally linked one reply up even one of the major companies, Valve, has said they don't know if VR will be a hit success. They are developing the technology because it allows them to make new and interesting entertainment products that they can't do with a keyboard and mouse. There's just only so much you can do with keyboard and a mouse for input.
You are 100% free to do whatever you want but I have to kinda question why anyone who claims to have zero interest in VR would reply in the comment section regarding a VR MMO…. :thinking:
Please, I'd love to see your multitude of studies. Please.
O.K. This took me literally 30 seconds to find, the first references a report from research firm SuperData, the second references a report from research firm Canalys:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-29-vr-the-biggest-loser-this-holiday
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603208/behind-the-numbers-of-virtual-realitys-sluggish-debut/
styopa
"OrbusVR is being built for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift as a full-scale MMORPG with all the basics — questing, combat, open-world zones, group content, and crafting — plus more unusual features like hybrid instanced dungeons, hidden and "feat" quests, player bounties, tiered safety zones for PvP"
…all on VR…for $10k?
Unless this is a trigger-kickstarter (ie it proves marketworthiness to release more substantial VC funding), I'm finding that hard to believe. It would be hard to get the ART done to a decent quality for $10k.
the proving market worthiness with kickstarter for a video game doesn't work. idk that it ever truly worked. the companies that succeeded that way already had VCs lined up before hand. and all the ones that didn't and were using ks that way failed to get investors after the fact except in like one or two circumstances and both of the ones that come to mind are crashing and burning right now basically (well at least in development hell or failing at the bottom line).
anyways ks page says they're up to 34k funded now so even then idk how viable the project is at that amount. repop was incredibly show string budget and they funded over 100k both kickstarters + first party sales.
If you read the kickstarter…
"I'm bringing this project to Kickstarter because I have heard from so many members of our growing community that they are as excited about making this happen as I am. Unlike many MMO and VR projects, I'm not coming to you with a game that exists only on paper or in eye candy trailers. Rather, our video is recorded from 3 play tests which we've already held, and more than 1,500 people have participated in. (In fact, you can watch lots of footage from those tests right now.) We have networking and server code that can host 100 players per shard, with hundreds of shards per server. We have four combat classes, more than twenty monsters, loot, inventory, and a dungeon with bosses already completed as a way to test our assumptions. In short, although this game still has a long way to go before it's ready for "official release," it's been vetted and battle-tested already by players just like you.
I'll continue to invest in this game until it's finished, but if you join me in supporting the game today, we can make it even better. The more artists, sound designers, writers, and programmers I am able to bring onto the team, the more content, polish, and fidelity the final version will have for us all. Your support will help make that happen. "
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