Where Oculus VR games go from here

Five years into his work with Oculus and Facebook, Jason Rubin has overseen more than $500 million worth of virtual reality games. He’s funded some of the world’s highest-profile development studios, witnessed a multibillion-dollar acquisition, and watched more than 1,300 titles launch.

And now, he says, the VR business feels like it’s ready to begin.

It’s a nice marketing line, one that promotes Facebook’s latest products and writes off its speed bumps, like slow headset adoption and a lack of breakout software. Yet it’s also consistent with what Rubin’s been saying all along, and it points to a future where the market for VR games — and Facebook’s approach to them — is changing.

With the release of Facebook’s wireless Oculus Quest headset in May, the company is making an aggressive attempt to take VR games mainstream. Thanks to strong early word of mouth, many studios are adjusting their plans to focus on it, putting more effort into games that don’t require high-end visuals and games that appeal to broader demographics.

Meanwhile, the Oculus Studios publishing group has been shifting from what Rubin used to call an “unpublisher” that would “seed money to whoever had an idea and see what stuck” into an organization that takes bigger bets and is more cautious, similar to a traditional console or PC publisher. (Though he adds that Facebook is “not noodling down on the last dollar” in the same way a publicly owned company might.)

Mix in a strategy of targeting “global, top-tier IP,” a plan to sign continually larger projects that will eventually reach the budgets of AAA console games, a focus on mixed reality streaming and new types of social experiences, and Facebook sees a path to get more customers in the door. But there are challenges ahead, with a new PlayStation, a new Xbox, and Google’s Stadia all competing for attention next year, and many players still feeling a general resistance to VR.

Last week, I sat down with Rubin and Facebook’s head of AR/VR content, Mike Verdu, to discuss the state of VR games and where they see things going next.

According to Verdu, a new generation of Oculus games is coming, and we’ll see the first example later this week.

The current Studios lineup

The Oculus Studios publishing group is in the middle of a transition. Five years ago, on his first day on the job leading the group, Rubin says he showed up to work and discovered he had 60 days to get software ready for the Samsung Gear VR, one of the company’s early headsets.

“You can’t QA a game in 60 days,” says Rubin.

Today, the group’s roster is filled with bigger projects and multiyear development cycles. It has had critically acclaimed titles, like space adventure Lone Echo, and games in a mix of genres, from dancing to driving to horror.

What’s been missing are breakout titles, games that draw new players into VR. Part of Facebook’s plan to create them involves signing high-end IP — with one report saying that Ubisoft has Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed VR games on the way — and part of it comes with delivering the sorts of fantasies players have been asking for in VR, mimicking experiences that have been popular outside of the format.

At the moment, the announced upcoming Oculus Studios lineup is filled with the latter, tackling the first-person action genre from almost every angle. It includes stealth action with Phantom: Covert Ops, action-RPG Asgard’s Wrath, action-adventure games Stormland and Lone Echo 2, and a military shooter from Respawn Entertainment.

Jason, you’ve been at Oculus [and Facebook] for about five years. And in that time, there have been quite a few really good games, but there haven’t been that many that have broken through and been mainstream successes — the kind that win big awards, or the kind that get people outside of VR communities to start talking about them. You know, there’s a ton of money that’s been spent. Do you ever sit back and think, “This is taking a little longer or has been a little harder than I expected five years ago?”

Jason Rubin: So, it’s definitely taking a long time but not longer than we expected. We always expected this. It takes quite a while to figure out a new medium with an entirely new language. And one of the most humbling things about working in VR for everybody, including the developers, is AAA developers become, like, B and C developers [for] their first game, because all of the rules that they’ve taught themselves over years, they don’t work. You don’t just translate a shooter straight into VR. You don’t just take, you know, Fallout, for example, and just port it. When you do that, it doesn’t really work very well, just like it didn’t work to take console games and shove them into mobile. [...]

We have done well compared to the unit sales on a lot of our products. In other words, if we had 100 million units out there, like PS4, our titles would be, you know, tens of millions of sellers. We’ve done well with the products considering the installed base. What’s been a challenge is getting the install base to be larger and getting people outside the install base excited about the titles. I think a lot of that was waiting for the form factor of Quest.

I played a few of Oculus Studios’ upcoming games last week [Phantom: Covert Ops, Stormland, and Asgard’s Wrath], and when I was playing, I kept having two reactions. One is that they’ve come a long way compared to what we first saw a few years ago. You can see all these little tricks that make them much more comfortable, much more exciting. The other is that I couldn’t help but see the limitations. They try to do so much that you tend to see more of the flaws than you do in something smaller in scope like Beat Saber. Do you feel that struggle, where you’re trying to do what’s been done in a new way but it’s not quite there yet?

Rubin: I would suggest that’s not the genre so much as it is, as big as these games are, they are not the budget of Uncharted. I know what Uncharted [cost, at least a couple of games ago]. I don’t know what this next one is, but I know what the budgets are. These are not those budgets. The team sizes are a quarter of the size of the team of an Uncharted, and we don’t outsource to the extent that they outsource. If you think of maybe a Metro, or a title like that, that’s done really well but isn’t Call of Duty, you probably see some of the same flaws coming through. And a lot of that is simply the scale of the team, and the amount of time and energy they can spend on stuff is different. And there’s a huge gap right now in the console and PC business between the stuff that comes out on Steam that’s done by small teams and the AAA stuff. There’s just not an in-between, and we’re crossing that in-between as we slowly get longer products with bigger teams to get up to the scale of the ones you’re seeing.

And I think what you’re seeing is, we’re still learning. So there’s some things that they’re trying to figure out what the VR version of what they would have done in the game is, and maybe they didn’t nail it. So there’s probably some of that. And three, five years from now, we’ll have nailed the language of VR.

And then some of it is simply they can’t go over something 100 times and throw it out 99 times to get to the last one, which is how you get perfection in a game these days. It is a grueling, massively expensive, and time-consuming process, and we’re doing massive games but they’re not super massive, like six years [of development]. If you think about GTA 5, it was a six-year project. That’s longer than I’ve been working in VR, and I was at the very beginning of our content pipeline. We could not have made that game for VR yet. So that comparison, we’re still going to fall a little short on. Five years from now? I don’t think so.

Mike Verdu: Yeah, and seconding the point on team size and investment level — those games were greenlit years ago. I think in successive generations of games, you’ll see us getting much closer to that mark. I would also say in a game like Asgard’s Wrath, that’s actually a big jump in a number of different ways. The full-body [inverse kinematics] system lets you feel like you’re actually a character in the game, in a way that a lot of VR games don’t. The melee combat? Incredibly hard to get right.

When the player has complete freedom — level of difficulty tuning is one thing, but that sense that you’re in a fight and you’re immersed in that fight and it doesn’t feel like an unfair fight — that’s a lot of work to get that balance right. And then locomotion in a big world is a huge challenge. So the sort of foundational pieces that that team has put in place to deliver an experience that even kind of gets to the point where it can be compared, using the language and grammar in VR, is quite an accomplishment, and that’s a concept that came together a couple years ago. So we’re moving pretty fast, and I think we’re pretty excited to see the titles we have coming next.

Rubin: Yeah, actually that specific example that Mike just gave is a great one to drill into, because it really does explain the difference between things. When you’re making a hack-and-slash title — I’m just going to call Asgard’s Wrath a hack-and-slash — you’ve got swords and you’re smashing. In 2D, you can cheat everything. If I want to slash the guy’s neck, [the game] just moves my arm to be at the right spot, moves him forward so his neck is right where it hits, and the neck will sever perfectly every time and it looks just great. When he hits me, whatever you want to do with the camera is fair game because I’m sitting in my chair and it just does whatever it does to the camera.

Those two things are extremely hard to get right in VR because I don’t have control over your hand and I can’t adjust you to the guy’s head. It looks weird if I can see the whole character and everything, and adjust the character. And so you may not quite get it perfect. They’ve done an incredible job making you feel like that stuff is connecting. You never expect to feel the resistance of hitting something in a 2D screen. You just get the sound effect, and it’s good enough because it’s a 2D screen. The lack of resistance, because you can’t stop your hand from moving, is something we’ve had to deal with in VR. [...] So the things you say that are not a hundred percent landing, it’s shocking they’ve come so close to landing it at all, that you would say they get most of it right.

Verdu: At least we’re in the realm where you can compare.

Rubin: Yeah.

I guess my question is, why try to compare when you’re going to inevitably fall short in some ways?

Rubin: Because the idea that you would say, “I have a virtual world, and I’m not going to make Lord of the Rings, and I’m not going to go out and hack and slash orcs,” is crazy. You have to solve that. We have to. Swords have to be solved for VR because people want to do it, right? And yes, you could take the sword and have blocks come at you and, you know, Beat Saber’s an amazing game. But people are also going to want to slash orcs. We have to solve these problems. That’s the wish fulfillment that VR brings, and we’re never going to get the holodeck. We all know it’s kind of science fantasy, but we’re headed there, right? And everything is a step. So, yeah, maybe the connection with the skeleton when you knock his head off right now feels a little janky, but give us a few years of iteration. It’ll feel a lot better.

Verdu: There’s almost like these convergent lanes of evolution happening. I mean, in one, Beat Saber makes no assumptions, and it just leans into what the platform does and it does it perfectly. It is, as you said, just brilliant and perfect and everything works. And that’s sort of building up from what the platform is capable of.

And then you have people’s expectations for a VR game — that I’m going to be in an immersive world, and I’m going to inhabit an interesting character, and that character is going to interact with other characters in a world, and you’ll be able to do interesting things, with the added promise of: the interaction is incredibly rich. I mean, think about the difference between just a standard controller and a 2D screen, and being able to move your arms and actually exist and move around in the space. That promises a dimension of interactivity that we’ve just never seen before. And trying to deliver on that promise is an admirable thing. It is a worthy goal. It is glorious in and of itself, and we should be trying to do that. And it will take time, and it will take many attempts, but I think the destination is worth it. And you see glimmers of brilliance. You see flickers of true potential there. [...] Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland, they’re fun games. They may have their flaws, but they’re really fun experiences. The fact that we’re as far along in that journey as we are is super encouraging to me.

Japanese developer support

While Facebook has attracted support for its Oculus headsets from studios across the globe, one territory that’s been slow to join has been Japan, with players in Japan complaining that not enough software has been localized, and international customers wondering when they’ll get to play games made by familiar Japanese studios.

Meanwhile, Sony has cornered the market, bringing acclaimed Japanese games such as Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Resident Evil 7, and Tetris Effect to PlayStation VR.

At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Facebook announced that all of its VR developer documentation is being translated into Japanese. That puts it years behind other territories, yet with the introduction of Quest, Rubin and Verdu say they expect to see more support from Japanese teams soon.

When I look at the Oculus store, it seems like there aren’t a lot of games from Japanese teams — or at least, high-profile Japanese teams. Why do you think that is?

Verdu: So, the headset actually has quite a lot of traction in Japan, but we haven’t localized a lot of games or products for that market. I think that over time you’ll see us roll out regionally, but the footprint in Japan isn’t quite there yet.

I’m thinking more about games made by Japanese studios that could be released internationally. It seems like a gap when you compare it — you know, obviously, Nintendo and Sony have very strong stuff. Even Microsoft. People make fun of Microsoft for not having great Japanese support, but it’s pretty far ahead of Oculus [and Facebook] right now.

Rubin: We’ll get there. It takes a while. There’s a lot of reasons. For the most part, it was an upswell in developer desire to make the first generation or two of software for us, and PCs are just not that widespread in Japan. So, the PC hacker-developer, that’s just not something they do in Japan. There’s some, but there aren’t a huge number of them. So some of our early titles were Japanese, you know, but we didn’t really get that hacker community going.

As Mike said, if you look at Quest, we have a huge amount of adoption in Japan right now, and what they’re saying to us is, “Where’s our software?” And that should lead to Japanese developers saying, “Wait, there’s a homegrown user base here. We should be making stuff.”

We need to localize. We need to speak more directly and clearly in the Japanese market. We are. It will happen. [...]

I feel like part of it, obviously, is people making their own games, but it’s also what you fund. Oculus Studios has not produced a big Japanese game yet. Is that coming soon? Is there stuff we will see in the next couple years of [the Studios lineup] that’s the equivalent of an Insomniac or Respawn? Like, a PlatinumGames or a FromSoftware or a team like that?

Verdu: Nothing to talk about yet.

OK. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like a gap at the moment.

Verdu: We are fully aware.

Rubin: And also, every developer cares about their home market, right? There are very few developers that develop here for something way over there. Maybe Eastern Europeans more than others, but even they build for their own market and then some of the things go internationally. With a lack of PC desire, and the [Gear VR] smartphone being a South Korean smartphone that was mildly popular in Japan but not a huge brand in Japan at the time, they never really pushed Gear VR that heavily. VR was just not set up to be massive yet in Japan. Quest has changed that and they’re now looking very seriously at it, so things will change.

Verdu: That dynamic that he’s describing is true of major studios and publishers everywhere. Quest has really been a game-changer and people see it, but that sort of initial “oh!” — it’s the same reaction I had. It’s like, Oh crap. This is actually here now, not five years from now. I may actually be able to make a business on this device. It takes a while for that bow wave to turn into the products that take full advantage of the platform down the road. But it’s quite clear that the Quest is considered a major evolutionary step beyond PC and beyond the sort of mobile-phone-on-your-face generation of mobile VR products.

Is there a sense at all that, because Sony is so established there — because they’re helping fund some of those teams and the VR ecosystem over there — that maybe those teams don’t need you quite as much?

Rubin: I don’t think we really look at it that way. I think maybe another way of looking at it besides the fact that, like I said, we were a PC product [and] they don’t really have PCs: They do have PlayStations heavily. Like, of course that existed. Five years ago when I started Studios, we had no international presence. Like, Sony had that, and they had it back in the ’90s when I was working with them, right? So remember, we’ve been building this division as we’ve been building the hardware. This is not a Samsung or a Sony or even a Microsoft, a group that had put out multiple iterations of hardware over generations and had an international team. We built this from the ground up in the last five years, and so when you look at hyper-localized markets with very specific needs and desires — not a Switzerland, which is very much like France or Germany to either side of it, but a Japan, which is a, you know, unique culture with a unique language and a unique desire stream — it’s hard for a new organization to be there very quickly.

But now that we have a product that is resonating with them, we’ve got to get there quick, and thankfully, Facebook is the kind of company that can grow and expand quickly. We’re not a startup anymore, and we’re not even a small United States company that’s looking at every penny of the bottom line of expanding into a new marketplace. We do have Facebook personnel on the ground in Japan, so we do have communications in Japanese to developers when they need it and stuff like that, so you will see this happen.

Vader Immortal: Episode I

When Oculus Quest launched in May, one of its flagship titles was Vader Immortal: Episode I, the first of three planned story-based episodes in the Star Wars universe.

Clocking in at around 40 minutes, Episode I showed glimpses of what a Star Wars action game could look like in VR, but kept its best gameplay in a side mode called Lightsaber Dojo. Which left me wondering if the team developing it ran out of time. Or maybe I just misunderstood what I was playing?

Let’s talk about Vader Immortal. Obviously, it’s an episodic series. Was any part of that decision to have it available for the Quest launch?

Rubin: Some of it was that. It was also — and you really should talk to ILMxLAB, because when it comes to creative control, they have utter creative control — but I think they wanted to tell a story in parts. I think they felt really comfortable with that. They wanted to give you a taste of it and have you come back and do more. Bingeing is great, and you could binge three or four episodes of that. Like, a gamer could, right? Then you’re not looking back at it probably with the same memory, because you did it in a day or three or five or seven, as opposed to waiting for the next one. And you really should talk to ILMxLAB because they’re creative control, but I think there was a little bit of, We want to tell this in parts, and we want people to think of the parts as separate story chunks as opposed to just stringing them all together.

It’s tough. For me, that game is painful because I see so much potential in it. You know, we’ve been hearing for years about how lightsabers should be good on Wii, should be good on Kinect. And they never have been. And now, finally, we know they can be great with Touch. You can see it in Beat Saber or the Vader Immortal Lightsaber Dojo. But then you get in the story and it’s just, like, a tutorial. It’s not a great game. And I’m curious if they just didn’t have the time for it.

Verdu: So, they made a very conscious decision to explore interactive storytelling. They, I think from the very start of the project, were emphasizing the narrative aspect and the character-driven aspect. And so I think you’re seeing some of that.

Rubin: There easily could, at some point, be a lightsaber-based game. But the purpose of Vader Immortal was to tell a story. And what we found early on was: Pure story, if you look at some of the Story Studio stuff — Henry, or things like that — you really can only give it so much time before you say, Why am I sitting in this interactive yet not interactable space? It feels very weird. You’re not part of the action. So to push the genre of storytelling in VR forward, we had to give you agency. We had to give you control over things. We had to put you in there, but we also really wanted to tell a story. So what I think you’re reacting to is that you like it, the story is great, but when do we get to the game? And that’s not the goal of that product. [...]

At some point in the future, you certainly could make a pretty damn kick-ass lightsaber game. And lightsabers have the advantage that — unlike an ax that you hit someone with in Asgard’s Wrath — you expect it to just go straight through them. [...] The challenge there is, you can do the same things to walls and everything else, and what happens? But whatever.

Verdu: I got into this business to, in part, try and figure out interactive storytelling, and the first company that I co-founded was actually all about adventure games. And if you remember, adventure games were puzzle solving around a narrative [at the time]. But some of those old text adventures connected you to characters and places in ways that even some current games don’t. And people still play them because there’s this callback to nostalgia. I think it’s a really good narrative design and memorable characters, and I think you’re seeing some of those compulsions come through in Vader, with less emphasis on puzzles that you’re beating your head against the wall to figure out. Which, you know, you can say [you can] just make the puzzles harder and you can stretch out the narrative, but I think what ILMxLAB wanted was something that had the right pacing.

I actually liked the short length. I personally think episodic is a great fit for VR because I’m not the type who wants to play 30 hours of Asgard’s Wrath. I want to play a few hours and move on to the next thing. Are you thinking about having more episodic stuff come out?

Verdu: I think you’ll see more of it, and we’ll continue to experiment with that form of interactive storytelling. It’s a very compelling experience, and it’s a way of experiencing that world that is unique, so I think it’s been a great result. I would certainly expect to see more of it.

Rubin: I think we’ll need both. Ultimately, there’s some people that would say no — “stop with these two-hour, four-hour things; I want to immerse myself for 30 hours in something.” We hear that from consumers. So we have to supply for everybody and, you know, as VR matures and as more people get in it and as more developers are bringing stuff out, we’ll figure out what the right thing is. It’ll probably be a combination, at the end.

Verdu: Yeah, there’s no reason not to keep experimenting. What if you had a really amazing hour and a half of narrative and then a game component that kept you going, and you carry the emotion from the narrative experience into even a multiplayer interaction? And I’m not talking about Star Wars, necessarily, I’m talking about other IPs and other worlds. But I think that that form is worth exploring more.

The Respawn partnership

Back in 2017, Facebook [then under its Oculus group] announced one of its highest-profile publishing deals to date — a partnership with Respawn, the studio run by some of the staff who created the Call of Duty and Titanfall series, to make a game for its Oculus Rift headset. In a trailer promoting the partnership at the time, Respawn staff referred to the game as a “realistic” and “authentic” military shooter, but both Facebook and Respawn have since stayed quiet on the game since.

Facebook is planning to publicly reveal the game, codenamed Project Rocket, on Wednesday during its annual Oculus Connect conference.

Let’s talk about Respawn. We know you’re revealing the game next week, but what can you say about it at this point?

Verdu: So, the fact that one of the best developers in the world chose VR to make a flagship game experience is a watershed. It’s amazing. We were talking earlier about how the teams that are learning the language and grammar of VR are also working really hard to be sort of AAA in all dimensions. And when you compare those experiences against the refined experiences on console and PC that have 25, 30 years of evolution to get right, to have a developer that has those standards and those sensibilities and the desire to explore this new world and do it with a great team is just incredibly exciting. And I think it’s a harbinger of things to come and I think it’ll be a watershed when it comes out.

Rubin: Without getting into the specifics, most of the larger developers that we’re now working with — and even larger ones that we haven’t announced yet — they were always interested when we called and said, “Hey, are you interested in VR?” They’re very interested. There are people on their staff who have it at home. They want to, but is it the right time to do it? Is it right for us? And this was a perfect example years ago. This project’s been announced for a few years. You know, this has been a long time in the making [...]

There is a DNA in that company. There is a gene that had been trying to express itself since the earliest of the games that they made, and they keep going back to try to do this thing that they want to do conclusively. They want to do it right, and they keep doing it better, but they [haven’t gotten] it 100% right and they may never get it 100% right. But the minute that they got into VR and actually looked, they said, This scratches the itch. This is the next step of that thing. This is something we need to do because this is part of our journey that we’ve been on since the beginning.

And that’s happened with a lot of companies that we’ve sent kit to, but what you’re going to see, I think you’ll get the idea: Oh, OK. I get it now. I understand why this was immediately like, you know, this is a new way of expressing this thing that we wanted to express. Because, you know, developers are artists, fundamentally. Like, there aren’t a lot of developers where you go to them and say, “Oh, we want a racing game.” “OK, fine. We’ll make you a racing game.” Those are generally not the best developers. Best developers? “Oh, I’m not interested in a racing game. What I want to make is this thing that’s in my head,” and that’s the thing they’re making.

The way you guys talk about this game, and the way I’ve heard other people talk about it, it seems like Facebook has a lot riding on this one. Is this kind of the big thing that everything’s been leading up to?

Verdu: I think it’s the first of a new generation. It’s not like a movie studio betting their year on a product. We’re just thrilled to have what we think is sort of the first of its kind, and it’s super exciting. Like, one of the top developers in the world, and they have a sensibility and they have a standard for what’s good, and they are picking up the skills to bring that to life in VR. And, you know, they’re thrilled with what they’re making and we’re thrilled to see that. There’s a lot of emotion around it and it’s very, it’s very cool. But, you know, riding on it? Probably kind of the wrong framing. But excited about it as the first of a new generation? Hell yeah.

Is this the biggest investment Facebook has made in one VR game?

Rubin: Ish.

Close?

Rubin: I mean, a lot of them have come in at about the same.

What would be the top tier of those?

Rubin: Well, Asgard’s [Wrath] has been a very long [process]. Stormland has been a project that’s been very long. The titles you’re seeing right now on PC are really long and started a long time ago. The next wave of those will be Quest and PC and/or PC, and they’re unannounced. But those are the bigger titles at the time. And we made these commitments [a while back]. I mean, we announced Respawn two years ago at [Oculus Connect], right?

Verdu: OC4, yeah.

Rubin: So it’s been a full two years since we announced it. You know, so these are long titles. Certainly Stormland is, like, three or four years in the making now. These are big, long titles.

When Facebook announced the Respawn partnership a couple years ago, it put a 2019 date on the trailer, which seemed very confident at the time. People usually hedge their bets a little more in case things get delayed. Do you remember what the logic was with calling that shot?

Rubin: Yeah, a really good developer. Who’s really good at delivering on time, and we believed in them. They said, “This is the product we want to make. This is the amount of time it’s going to take. Here’s the budget we need and we’re going to deliver this.” And we were pretty sure they were going to do it because that’s who they are. If Insomniac tells you — you know, if Naughty Dog, back in the day when I was there, told you, “We’re coming out for Christmas,” you could bank that it was coming out for Christmas. That’s the kind of developer they are. And that was the project that they wanted to make. You know, there are other developers that have different methodologies. Some developers say, “We don’t know when we’re even going to go into production on this. We’re going to experiment until we get there.” That wasn’t their style. They were like, “We know what game we’re making. We know how long it’s going to take.”

We only have a few months left in 2019. Is it still coming this year?

Rubin: We believed heavily it would come out at the end of ’19, or thereabouts, and so we were willing to put that line in the sand, and the developer is going to come close to hitting their target.

So you’ve got the Respawn game, which you say is the first of a new generation, and you have Quest, which you say is the first thing you’ve seen “radically over deliver” in VR, but they don’t go together, at least as of today.

Rubin: Remember, these were long productions. These titles started before Quest was a product that was going to get made.

That doesn’t mean you couldn’t announce it now and have it come out in two years.

Verdu: That bow wave that I talked about. That bow wave that I talked about applies internally.

The future

When Rubin and Verdu talk about Facebook and Oculus headsets, they rarely talk about short-term plans. They often speak in decades, saying that at a point down the road, everything will be perfect. And it’s hard to argue with a hypothetical.

To close out the interview, I asked them about their plans for the near future — specifically next year, when the game industry will be taking some big steps forward from some of its biggest players. Somehow they ended up talking about the PlayStation 6.

Broadly speaking, what do you see the next big trends being with VR games? We’ve seen a lot of improvements in action games. We’ve seen a lot of experiments. That’s kind of been the first phase. What’s the next phase going to be?

Verdu: I’m very excited about the intersection of VR and streaming, and I think what goes with that is an evolution in social. I think the promise of interaction with other people in this new medium is incredibly exciting, and we’ve just barely scratched the surface of that. And that doesn’t necessarily mean Ready Player One, you’re synchronously in the same space with somebody. Just imagine a world that you can affect that other people come into and can affect as well, and that you’ve got this shared creation over time and a communication that happens asynchronously. And the gameplay that can happen around streamers who may be playing with each other and interacting with their followers presents this asymmetric form of social that could be very, very compelling. [...]

And then I don’t think we’ve figured out all the cool things that you can do with this platform yet, and it’s not like you can call the ball on it at this point. You can look at some of the directions people are going, and user-generated content in a virtual space is potentially a very exciting direction as well.

Rubin: Yeah, we haven’t even seen a lot of the genres that are going to end up [defining VR games in the long term]. Beat Saber is probably the first genre, if you will, but there will be more. A lot more.

Next year is going to be pretty busy for Sony, Microsoft, and Google. Facebook has some nice buzz right now with Quest, but it’s going to be harder to compete for people’s attention next year. Do you feel a need to kind of counterprogram against those announcements?

Verdu: So, the experiences we’re offering are really unique and different, so I think we’re not quite going head-to-head with those consoles. We’re offering something that’s interesting and new and unique and different, and the promise of experiences that you can’t have anywhere else. And, you know, the story in the console world is one of convergence, where you have games that are now played on phones, PCs, and consoles. And throw streaming in there for good measure. It’s kind of a furball. There’s this really interesting disruption and everybody’s struggling to differentiate, and we have this very natural differentiation, and all of these projects in the pipeline that highlight the ways in which VR is interesting and different and new. I think it naturally counterprograms. It’s not even that we have to do it.

Rubin: It also might be complementary. I mean, a lot of what you’re seeing right now is [...] streaming actual games in the cloud. And that’s happening. It’s going to succeed. It’ll take time. It’ll have its flaws. But as that succeeds and you need less hardware locally and you can play on whatever you’re playing on, the best screen might just be your VR headset, because how big do you want your TV to be? Or do you want to be sitting? Do you want multiplayer stats over here, the ability to play HBO over here, your text messages over here — whatever you want outside of the screen, do you want that room? Fine. [...]

And then, oh, on top of Stadia or Xbox streaming or PlayStation streaming, there’s this store here. What’s this Beat Saber thing? Or, I love Star Wars, or whatever thing we’re talking about in a few years. Yeah, actually, I’m also a VR gamer and just, like, the whole “I’m a mobile gamer, I’m a PC gamer” — it’s kind of like, you’re both. I think you’re just going to end up being all of the above.

I feel like next year, it’s going to be a little harder.

Rubin: Next year, that’s less likely to happen.

Quest, you know, is just taking off.

Rubin: Yeah, you know, next year, game streaming isn’t going to be a major thing. But three years from now, four years from now? And three years, four years from now, Quest will look very different physically. The resolution of the screens will be different. All this stuff.

Do you think we’ll see a new version of Quest? Something with the Quest name but another evolution?

Rubin: Quite possibly. I can tell you the technology underlying these things is moving incredibly quickly, right? So the question is, when do you actually launch something? The screen resolution is going up regardless of when we launch. The weight that we would build these things at is going down whether or not we launch. Setting up another factory line, launching another product, to a certain extent, is a separate question from the technology. It’s a question about when do you want to mark that line in the sand? When do you want to run an advertising campaign? When do you want to do all of the new things you do? But the technology is going to move so invariably.

This is the dodge that console makers have been making [that] you guys don’t even listen to anymore. Is there going to be a PlayStation 6? Actually, this time, for the first time, that may be a decent question. But with PlayStation 4, is there going to be a PlayStation 5? “Oh, who knows?” Of course there is, right? When — that’s the question. So, these technologies are going to keep happening.

I think there will be a PS6, too.

Verdu: Do you think there will be a PlayStation 6?

Yeah, probably.

Verdu: Yeah. Video streaming has been the thing that I think is sort of underrated in the seismic effects it’s having on the industry. Game streaming may do that, but it’s years away.

Rubin: Yeah, it’s a few years away.

I feel like a lot of these things seem like they’re moving really fast, but in terms of the actual products you get, end up moving pretty slowly.

Rubin: Consumers adopt a lot slower than technology moves. There’s no question about that. That’s a consistent, and that’s true everywhere. It’s just that in hindsight, we ignore the beginning of the curve. Like, we ignore the Newton period. We ignore the BlackBerry period. We think of the iPhone now, but there was actually a pretty decent mobile gaming curve that came before [Apple] opened its store and things started really taking off.

And we’re kind of coming out of that right now with Quest and Rift S, and you’ll look back and you’re not going to say, well, Gear VR. We just won’t, you know?

Update 9/25: We originally referred to Oculus as an organization, as opposed to a product line and brand within Facebook. We have updated the story to reflect recent organizational changes within Facebook.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.