“That niche is very, very, very â — and I could add a few verys here â — small.”
– SVP of business development Michal Andrzej Nowakowski says Valve’s VR minded goals with Half-Life: Alyx place it in a different corner of the market than CD Projekt.
Valve’s sudden new entry in its long-running Half-Life series, a VR exclusive called Half-Life: Alyx, launches right around the same time as CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, but the company is largely unconcerned that Alyx might interfere with Cyberpunk 2077’s success.
Addressing the concerns of an investor CD Projekt’s latest earnings call, senior vice president of business development Michal Andrzej Nowakowski explained that the company views VR as a relatively small segment of the overall market and, beyond that, it doesn’t see the VR space as somewhere it wants to be right now.
“VR remains an extremely nichey niche of the market, like it’s very, very small,” answered Nowakowski. “The only reason I can think of why Valve has decided to actually put this title in the market is because they actually have a corporation on the hardware side of things…This is probably a big effort for them to sort of try to expand that. That niche is very, very, very â — and I could add a few verys here â — small.”
“So from the market perspective, are we afraid? No, because it’s a very different niche,” he continues. “This is an endeavor to sort of try to push the hardware while we are really targeting the mass markets where it is, which is major consoles and the PCs without the need to have the VR gear.”
That investor also questioned if CD Projekt was looking to convert existing titles to VR in the future, but joint CEO Adam Kicinski adds that any game made for VR should be first designed with VR in mind, while also noting that CDPR is keen to look towards “delivering new games than working on old titles” in the future.