publish them and make money. It’s been a long time getting to that point.” Last but least, O’Luanaigh also credits the
organisation formerly known as Oculus and Facebook. “They’ve done more than anybody else in this space, and they get a lot of stick from people. But you know what? The headset is great. They’ve sold some brilliant numbers, and they’re really pushing it forward very hard. We’re big fans of theirs. “There’ve been times when it’s been difficult as a
studio. In the early days of VR, sometimes you’re like, where’s our next project going to come from? How are we going to keep everybody going? But now we’re in this reverse situation where we’ve got more work than we can handle and we’re turning projects down, which is why we’re growing and expanding so fast.”
VR IS SEXY As of this year nDreams comprises three studios, the main hub in Farnborough that O’Luanaigh calls a “sort-of headquarters” which is now run to a hybrid model, with staff encouraged to come in two or three days a week, and two fully remote studios called Orbital and Elevation. “Because those studios were started with remote working in mind, everything has been built up around that. They’ve come up with some really clever ways of fostering the culture and getting people playing together and talking. Lots of systems, software and methods to try and foster that teamwork that you’d maybe miss a little bit sometimes when you’re remote.” Despite establishing remote working early, one
wonders how nDreams is affected by the omnipresent skills shortage, given that most would expect development skills specific to VR are perhaps in even shorter supply. “It’s not been too bad, actually,” says O’Luanaigh.
“I think we hired 21 new people in May. A record month. I think it helps that VR’s quite sexy. You talk about working on PlayStation VR2 and Ghostbusters and that’s quite attractive. “We’re also doing a really nice thing with the
nDreams Academy, a scheme that is primarily aimed at bringing in new talent and training them up to get them ready for the game team. We do quite a lot of work with training people up to help with some of those hard to find skills, because there are some roles where it’s just really hard to find the right people. But we’re quite lucky and I think we’ve got a really nice culture and quite a good reputation for being a really nice place to work.”
NATIVE PLAY The stars may be aligning for nDreams, but of course they never remain static in the firmament for long, with a successor to the Quest 2, rumoured to be called the Quest Pro, being readied for the autumn. Then next year, of course, Sony will launch the PSVR2. O’Luanaigh is excited by the possibilities, from the
ultra thin lenses that Meta has been teasing, to eye- tracking, and the inevitable increases in processing power allied to reductions in weight and form factor that will inevitably come with each new generation. “You may see them running off the cloud at some point as well,” he says of future XR devices, “where you don’t have to have processing and GPUs on the headset, it’s all just being done in the cloud. I think that ultimately might be the end destination, but that’s going to be a little way off, I think.” What about the games? Curiously O’Luanaigh is not
a fan of the capable fan-created mods that are currently resourced through Patreon, such as those for GTA V, Elden Ring and the most recent Resident Evil games, many of which are doing as good a job selling the
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