We're looking for new writers to join us!

E3 2016: Serious Sam VR coming in the summer, Oculus tried pay them a ton of money for timed exclusivity - Updated with response from Oculus and Croteam

by: John -
More On: E3 2016 Serious Sam VR

No, this isn't Serious Sam 4, but it's a nice side project that Croteam's working on. Serious Sam VR looks to be a room standing Serious Sam type game where you're going to be using an HMD like the HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift with Touch controls to fire at hordes of enemies coming at you.

The game's due out in Early Access this summer.

In some interesting news, it seems Oculus tried to pay Croteam a large sum of money to make it a timed Oculus Rift game. How much money? The redditor from Croteam won't say, but he said it was a lot and he thinks it was about 6 months time for it to only be on the Rift. They turned it down because they hate exclusives and think a good game will make good money in the long run. Good for Croteam! You guys will be getting my money when this is out.

-Update

We've received word from both Oculus and Croteam on the story about Oculus paying Croteam for exclusivity.

Statement From Oculus
We regularly offer developers financial grants to help fund early development of new titles to accelerate development or expand the scope of the game. In some cases, we exchange funding in return for launching on the Oculus Store first, with the expectation that the game will go on to launch on other platforms.

In the case of Croteam, at no time did we request that they stop development for other platforms, and we look forward to seeing Serious Sam be successful across the entire VR ecosystem.

Statement from Croteam, Alen Ladavac the CTO
Ok, Mario, you've had fun here, now let's get serious.
I want to clarify some of the inaccuracies about our relationship with Oculus. Oculus did approach us with an offer to help fund the completion of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope in exchange for launching first on the Oculus Store and keeping it time-limited exclusive. Their offer was to help us accelerate development of our game, with the expectation that it would eventually support all PC VR platforms. We looked at the offer and decided it wasn’t right for our team. At no time did Oculus ask for, or did we discuss total exclusivity or buyout of support from Vive. We look forward to supporting Rift and Vive.