As content gets developed, more and more users will be attracted to the experiences. Since it is relatively a new platform, there are several challenges that a content developing house will need to grapple with. Some are due to the nascent nature of the tech while others are related to the significant differences between traditional gaming and VR gaming experiences.

First and foremost, the content developer cannot afford the luxury of a long development cycle time. The strategy is to get a decent product out of the door and then build upon improvements based on the consumer feedback. There is risk in loosing market recognition and revenue recognition if you engage in a long build cycle anticipating every need of the user for the content. In an article published at ign.com by Mitch Dyer this year, Tim Sweeney said “I think we are years away from the point where you’re going to build a triple-A, hundred million dollar budget game for VR,” Sweeney said. “But every year the market is going to more than double in size and the budgets will more than double, and I think everybody’s going to be working their hardest to keep up with what’s possible.” How do you then decide when to release the product?

In order to make optimal decisions, you are always looking for analytics that can provide you insightful information. For instance, how do you shift through the volumes of “Gaze data” to understand the user engagement and focus on the right places. In VR, visual notifications can become overlooked. Capturing this type of design flaw, and other VR design issues has been difficult with analytics. Testing, although hard in this platform is going to play a very important role moving forward. The team has to ensure that consistent frame rates are being upheld in every scenario and at every possible location in the environment. Sony’s Vernon Harmon recently that user experience is a primary concern; Vernon warned, “Any dropped frames can cause discomfort, not just disruption of presence.” SONY is pushing for 90fps as standard from its content producers. Before your product can be deployed as a consumer grade VR experience, you will have to spend a lot of time in user testing and building incremental releases to tackle the most fundamental of the user experience issues. How do you then decide your testing strategy and optimal resource allocation?

Although analytics capability in VR is limited to a degree at this point, there are emerging companies that are building this core capability as their service offering. “Game Analytics” offered by Unity is going to be an important resource for some of the indie game developers. When it comes to VR, Ghostline, an Iceland based company is working on a VR analytics based service offering. Their promise is to help creators make decision decisions faster and more reliably, and increase the time available for you to innovate. Their analytics platform will support HTC, OCULUS and Playstation VR. Retinad, currently in the Rivers program is also tackling the issue of VR game analytics and associated monetization by using Ads. FishBowl VR is in the process of building a platform that will allow developers to test products. Their platform is intended for VR developers to figure out what works and what doesn’t through a remote panel of hundreds of early adopters. Another upstart in this space that is looking at analytics and ad optimized offerings is Adoptimal.

There are still a lot of challenges in this area and as we move forward, we will see more and more innovative service offerings that will help content developing houses to speed up the development cycle by offering analytical feedback.