We are experiencing a historical paradigm shift in the way we experience games!
Throughout history, people have been fascinated by moving pictures, stories and fantasies. Every time a new way to present alternative realities has emerged, people have embraced them for their ability to take us beyond the ordinary. Starting from the first oral stories told of the ancient gods to pictures, theatre, books, cinema and video games. Each step has taken us closer to fully immersing ourselves into another world.
We are now living the time of another new step: virtual reality.
Fireside stories were human kind’s favorite past time until video games.
Campfire – Albert Bierstadt – 1863.
Games, or the way we have been playing games is going to change drastically within the next ten years. With the new wave of virtual reality equipment by Sony, Oculus, HTC and a bunch of smaller hardware developers, all backed by big software companies like Facebook, Crytek and Valve, we are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way we can experience virtual realities (pun intended).
We all know what virtual reality is by now, those of you from the industry attending the Nordic Game 2017 event should anyway. The technology that allows us to exist in a virtual world in a way we have never existed before. However, virtual reality is far from perfect technology, motion sickness, expensive equipment and bad design, in general, can turn people off from this amazing technology. (The errors of the developers are a lot more drastic because they now actually exist in your world!) However, for issues brought by a new technology, these are far from being severe. They said flying a plane heavier than air was impossible, and some 60 years from the first flight people landed on the moon. The motivation to explore and reach places beyond our ordinary reality can only be admired. Therefore, I’m pretty sure the few issues with VR are solvable.
Rawr!
We are Evocat Games: harbingers of virtual realities! We are here to make awesome games; games that take you beyond this reality. We are a startup game studio from Kajaani, Finland. our focus is to create exceptional VR-games. We have already been gathering a bit of fame with our prize-winning local versus VR-game Nemesis Perspective.
We believe that developing for VR is like exploring new laws of physics; you think you figured something out, and then something completely unexpected happens. Frustrating? Maybe. Fun and rewarding? Absolutely! I cannot even count how many times we have “figured out locomotion in VR”, only to find out that your third test subject is projectile vomiting after 5 minutes of playtesting. However, when you try out a new idea and it surprisingly works, for a moment you feel like a scientist! (Not saying we have figured something out but we are super excited for our next project!)
So what’s the plan?
We want to be the company that was first out there on the new frontier creating awesome VR-experiences for players, and establish ourselves as one of the best VR-developers out there. We are a part of the new wave of developers brought by the new technology, and we want to stand out from the crowd by creating games that no-one has yet even dreamed of and executing some diamond class marketing! We realize that even good games don’t just market themselves, and we want everyone to know how amazing virtual reality can really be!
But we don’t want to just make games. In ten years we want to expand our business as the Evocat Interactive. Encompassing both VR-games with Evocat Games, practical applications with Evocat Solutions. And who knows, because we are working closely to the Kajaani University of Applied Sciences, maybe even start a trainee program with the school’s game development track! This, of course, is only possible after we have achieved some success on Evocat Games, but we all share a strong belief in our success! Our plan is grand, but like a famous person might or might have not once said: It’s better to aim too high and fail, than to aim too low and succeed.
Unrelated historical person. But you can use your imagination!
Raphael – Portrait of Michelangelo as Heraclitus, 1510–11
We are certain that virtual reality is the next big thing in the gaming industry; it’s here today, and it will only keep growing. So if you have not yet checked out virtual reality, go do that and embrace the future!
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, check out more posts at our blog. Evocat Games is going to be at the Nordic Game 2017 event so feel free to come talk to us during the event!