Why do indie developers make games for VR?

In my time lurking on a few Internet communities, I've noticed that a surprising number of indie developers develop for - and by extension stake their livelihood on - VR.
A lot of the time, the reason for this is quite simply that they want to get into the VR market early, before it is flooded with interactive refuse in the same way as the Steam store. I understand this to some degree, but it's an argument balanced out by the incredibly niche market.

The real confusion stems from the question, "Why the hell would you ever decide to become financially dependant on selling a game for a highly experimental platform?"

As an indie developer, money is almost never disposable. Even in the most successful cases, the developers of the game "N" are still making barely enough to get by.

Of course, there's the argument that an indie developer feels that their artistic intent is best expressed through a VR experience, which is fine. I am a firm believer than just about any medium is a suitable medium for something.

According to statistics from Horizon Media, about 36% of the American population are interested in owning a VR headset as of 2016.

Only 24% of people are willing to pay over $250 for a VR headset, which should be immediately alarming for prospective VR developers. When a third of even the potential audience are turned off by a price lower than any VR headset being sold as of right now(the cheapest I could find was priced at $400, the Playstation VR), there's a problem.

Some more statistics from the Pew Research Center indicate that approximately 49% of adults play video games on any platform. If I do the math, that means that only 73% of adults who play video games are interested in trying VR, and only 48% are interested in spending over $250 dollars to do so.

Even with these grim figures, keep in mind that a large number of these people will still never buy a VR device. The ones that do may only play a handful of games on it.

The market that indie VR developers are trying to reach is very sparse, but the lack of competition on the market is immediately balanced by the fact that the audience for VR games is incredibly small.

I may or may not be bitter about being unable to try VR because of chronic migraines triggered by eye strain.

And if you have been, thanks for reading.

stay tuned

Preventing Burnout

This is a legitimately useful post that I'm making, rather than highly subjective musings. Enjoy!

I am very prone to what is called "burnout", a term referring to a developer getting tired or otherwise dissuaded from continuing to work on their project. This has been problematic, considering that it's caused me to kinda abandon two other projects in the past, so I've decided to share some tips that I've either come up with or seen somewhere else online.

One of the most useful things I've noticed is that it's important to pace yourself - even if you don't want to. This means that you shouldn't try to work more than 4-6 hours on your project per day. Of course, this is coming from the perspective of someone who has to go to school regularly, so perhaps 6-8 would be a more appropriate number for someone who otherwise has no other preoccupations.

The feeling of "I want to work on this project but I can't" in my own experience helps to keep the enjoyment of working on it fresh and lively in my own mind, which means I'm less likely to experience burnout.

Another thing that helps more than I would have expected is keeping an hour count. I use the Godot editor on Steam, which automatically records your hours spent "playing" any particular application and by now I have about 90 hours on record. This helps just for the sake of a number ticking up being somewhat satisfying. Maybe this won't work for you, but it's worth a go.

A pretty useful tip that I use a lot is that if I discover a bug or something that I really don't want to do, I schedule it for either tomorrow or the day after. The most important thing is that I do it then, procrastinating sets a bad precedent for the future. This can be difficult, but it's very useful. If you can suppress thoughts like "ugh I don't want to do this" or "grr this is going to be so much trouble" in lieu of thoughts like "I can make this bit blue" or "where can I add dithering", it helps a lot.

Something that helps quite a bit is making a post on your devblog - provided you have one. If you don't have one, make one and post it to /r/devblogs or something similar. There's another whole post to be made to talk about devblogs and how they're helpful, but just trust me, seeing the "All time views" number tick up slowly is tremendously satisfying.

This is something that I've seen is commonly suggested but somewhat underrated. If you're stuck on something, shut your eyes for a few moments and picture it in your mind in as much excruciating detail as you can. Besides the beneficial side effects of exercising your imagination, this helps you with design, as well as allowing you to recognize the potential of what your game could be if you do everything exactly right.

One last thing that is tremendously useful; if you're not feeling motivated, think of one very small thing that you can do to your game. Bonus points if its very menial or repetitive and doesn't require creative effort, because while interacting with your game in any way you might start being able to think of ways to tackle other problems, whether they're how to recreate something graphically or how to tackle a tricky bug.

Even if you plan on working for 5 minutes, you will often work for much longer once you start. Sometimes the hardest part of something is to start it, and then the rest becomes quite enjoyable.

Anyway, that concludes my list of (hopefully) helpful tips, and if you have done, thanks for reading!