"There's a zeitgeist happening with VR right now", claims veteran video game CEO Jeff Hilbert

When the technology was initially introduced, there was a huge amount of hope and potential placed on the shoulders of virtual reality, with some looking at the technology as the next great leap forward for gaming and interactivity. However, VR never quite took flight and for years was hampered by expensive models and even a technological setup that made it inaccessible to the majority of fans. The Meta Quest did look to alleviate much of these issues by offering a more affordable and wireless experience, but there was still another problem in that software developers only infrequently managed to make games worthy of investing in the still somewhat nice VR platform.

But could things soon change? During our time at DevGAMM, we spoke with veteran CEO Jeff Hilbert, with the conversation shifting to the realm of VR and why he's now looking to invest and further explore the space.

"No, I never bought into VR and AR 10 years ago. I started buying in two years ago, and I'm buying in more and more, even now as we're hearing everything from Meta, because I'm simply watching the numbers," Hilbert began.

As for why he has now changed his tune, so to speak, Hilbert told us the following.

"Well, Google doesn't share, Meta doesn't share, but you can kind of pick up ancillary numbers by watching the market and watching that, 'oh, they're doing a sequel'. You're looking at it like, 'oh, they just did an update'. That's an expensive update. Then you can kind of look at the content they're doing, part of this is being in the game industry, they must be generating a lot more revenue than we think.

"So the market segmenting, everybody was trying to do VR, and there just weren't a lot of good VR games. They just weren't good, they weren't interesting, they weren't good. The cameras are getting better, people are learning how to... people are getting more comfortable wearing them. So there's just a whole thing that's happening. There's a zeitgeist happening with VR right now where people are getting more comfortable wearing them. The headsets are getting lighter, the fidelity is going up, and people are really learning how to make the games for it, for a better experience. And that's it.

"It's very interesting because people were talking with me about, 'I don't think VR is going to make it. I'm not ready for VR. We're not ready for it'. And then all of a sudden, when everyone is saying the industry is going down, I'm like, I'm in."

To cap off, Hilbert touched a little more on why we should be paying attention to what Meta is doing and how the company is operating its VR and metaverse division.

"Money is coming from somewhere because VCs are not investing in this anymore, so they have to be doing it out of cash flow, and to do that update out of cash flow, it's selling. So that's my metric that I'm focusing on right now."

Check out the full interview with Hilbert below where we also touch on adaptations, how billion-dollar franchises are built upon $20 million budgets, and how consumers don't play grants but games.