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Oculus showed 41 games for the Rift VR headset in San Francisco ahead of this week's Game Developers Conference. Impressively, a full 30 of them will launch with Rift in a couple of weeks on 28th March. Most of the remaining 11 will follow hot on their heels. This is great software support by the standards of any game hardware launch I can think of, let alone one by a company new to this sort of thing (albeit with Facebook's deep coffers behind it). Oculus' confidence in putting it all on display is justifiable.More so when you consider just how polished the games on display were. The VR scene has been dominated up to this point by proof-of-concept demos, indie experiments and hacked support for popular titles. Oculus has games, real games, substantial games, all of them running smoothly and ready to go. There's a broad mix too, of strategy, sport, puzzle and action games, of names like Project Cars and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter alongside indie recruits to the cause and the fruits of Oculus' nascent publishing program - games like the mascot platformer Lucky's Tale and Insomniac's slick action-adventure Edge of Nowhere.
Software sells hardware, and in this department Oculus seems to be getting a lot of things right, which will come as a relief after the bruising blow dealt yesterday by Sony, which has priced PlayStation VR $200 cheaper than Rift (never mind the difference in cost between a PS4 and a VR-ready PC). In the battle of the hardware platforms, Oculus, despite having been the one to prove VR was ready for its close-up in the first instance, now risks getting caught in the middle between the cheaper and more mass-market PlayStation VR and the money-no-object HTC Vive with its astonishing 'room scale' capability. But Rift has the games to back it up, right here, right now. As so many hardware platforms have proven in the past, it only takes one game to make all the difference in the world. One of these 41 could be the one to do it.
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