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Survey: Over 20% of VR/AR devs are working on platform exclusives

Last week the producers of the Virtual Reality Developers Conference released the first-ever VRDC VR/AR Innovation Report, a compilation of responses from professionals involved in the development of virtual and augmented reality.

Notably, this new report offers an exclusive glimpse into the rapidly-expanding, diverse and hard-to-measure VR/AR industry - from sustainability of the market, to market challenges, platform availability, funding and more.

For more information and to download the report, download it for free here!

This inaugural VR/AR Innovation Report comes in advance of the highly anticipated standalone VRDC event, which will take place November 2nd and 3rd in San Francisco. Reported findings are based on responses from more than 500 professionals currently working to develop VR/AR experiences.

To give you a better sense of the data available within the report, today we'd like to highlight a particularly notable finding regarding how many developers are working on platform-exclusive VR or AR projects.

With multiple consumer-grade VR and AR headsets entering the market this year, the question of exclusivity -- developing games and experiences to be released exclusively on a single headset, either temporarily or permanently -- has become an important one.

There are lots of reasons for developers to make exclusivity deals, but not much hard data on exactly how common the practice currently is in the rapidly-expanding VR/AR market. With that in mind, we asked those surveyed whether or not their next title would be exclusive to a single VR/AR platform -- and the results were surprising.

The majority of those surveyed, 78.1 percent, said that no, their next project would not be released exclusively on a single platform. That means, of course, that 21.9 percent of those surveyed said yes, their next release would be exclusive to a single VR/AR platform.

Since no timeframes were specified, these responses could conceivably refer to both permanent platform exclusives and timed deals where a title is available exclusively on one VR/AR platform for a limited time before seeing a wider release.

More details about what VR/AR devs are up to, including which headsets they're developing for and where their funding is coming from, is freely available within the report.

VRDC 2016 will take place November 2-3 at the Park Central Hotel in San Francisco. For more information on VRDC 2016, visit the show's official website and subscribe to regular updates via Twitter and Facebook.

Gamasutra, VRDC and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

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