Early Access Lessons from Raw Data

[Music] if we could have everybody's attention thank you for joining us today to uh learn a little bit about uh raw data and Early Access and what we did um to accomplish the great things that we have before we get started though I would like to remind everybody please turn down your cell phones put them on vibrate um just so that we don't get interrupted and also I would be remiss if I did not uh remind everybody to fill out their electronic uh review forms it's very important to GDC and it also really helps us in our presentations uh so that we can do better again and again so without further Ado I would like to introduce Mike mctire our director of design for servos hi yay and uh my name is Chris Huish uh I'm head of Studio lucky enough to work with this Talent a gentleman as well as a few talented people in the front second row here uh we have Nathan bber and Alex

silen founders of cios yay and then also uh tents Roger and Megan who are part of the team really helping us out as well as John so uh you can Corner them later for questions if you can't find us you're welcome um so I would like to get started uh first things first for those of you who uh may not have seen a whole lot of raw data or would like a refresher I'd like to kick off with a little trailer that our marketing team is is put together it's a fantastic new trailer to give a little insight into what the game is and where it's [Music] going stop do you even know why you're really here you call yourselves a resistance

but what are you resisting advancement [Music] Evolution immortality you think you're free but you're not you are simply a weapon catastrophic data Bridge detected initiating facility meltdown [Music]

oh my God make the Meat Puppets pain [Music] [Music] yeah all right all [Applause] right so for those of you who are watching you may have noticed the co-op online piece that was tagged in there so we are very happy to announce that we have co-op uh crossplatform play with uh Oculus and Oculus store and steam users come by our booth to check it out we can talk more about that later uh but just

to jump right into it why are we here today we're here to share some insights into raw data I'd like to start off by pointing out that this was the first VR game to generate uh over a million dollars of Revenue in its first 30 days an amazing accomplishment and great validation that there is revenue to be made in the VR market with the right content what was the next slide top charts uh yes um so this is uh another big part of that too is uh you know we weren't exactly sure how raw data was going to perform right away right uh the team had its aspirations and was working you know incredibly hard on the product and we were just so excited that we were able to uh be the number one title to top the steam charts when we released the Early Access of raw data so that was a huge accomplishment for the entire team working on the product yeah and and a great accomplishment for the industry so we're here to tell you a little bit about how we got there um but I'll start off with a little bit of the evolution of of what led up to data in

2013 cios was founded um and it was founded to further research on emersion and new forms of VR Gaming the uh the founders Nate and Alex and James I think James is here too somewhere somewhere there he is James uh so the founders got together um at USC and really learned a lot and pioneered a lot about VR and they wanted to bring that uh into the commercial space and part of that was they wanted players to really feel the rush of battle uh the awe of exploration the exhilaration of Imagining the future and uh doing all of this in a highly immersive way so hopefully our insights and anecdotes today can really provide some learnings that will help you on your path to VR greatness this clicker seems to need a double click so Mike if you talk about yeah so to talk about some of the uh the early developments the the studio made one of the first uh projects or prototypes they had led up to creating

raw data was actually a product called bullet time Apex um I wouldn't necessarily expect everybody to know what that is and this is actually before my T time with the team um but this really was a pretty amazing time for for the uh the studio itself um they were really exploring a lot of the boundaries the early boundaries right the the hardware is not out at this point people don't have it right so figuring out uh what can they do with it how do you handle just the basic things from interacting with objects to using weapons within the world dealing with enemies within an environment that you actually travel through and there were so many important uh VR Lessons Learned From that that fed directly into the design of raw data so that was a really uh important uh project for the team internally because it laid the foundation with the core mechanics as Mike said of what led to Raw data and it really highlights one of the things that CIO uh holds true to its development which is especially for VR is to focus on the core mechanics first get something that feels really really good uh for VR

before you start to expand uh beyond that with with your game and that you know it's something that in in other forms of game development is kind of taken for granted because the mechanics are fairly well established and you can kind of just Brute Force Everything at Once to to a degree but in VR there's so many new areas to design and explore so many new technologies that you have to create that taking the time to really focus on that core mechanic before you start to put a metag game around it is uh particularly important and it served us very very well so then um some of the lessons in particular that the the team learned um from these early prototypes like we were just talking about uh one of those big lessons is the difference between realism vers um usability right so a lot of people in particular in the early days and even now still in VR the one of their major focuses I want to recreate real life verbatim exactly in VR and it's sometimes that works well and a lot of times it doesn't uh because at the

end of the day at least what we're trying to do is make great game experiences right so one great example here that we have up on the screen is again going back to Bullet time Apex the team initially made a shotgun amongst many of the other weapons that they made and they had stock on the shotgun and on the other weapons and such trying to create um that uh impression of reality but actually once we got that into the game and players were actually holding the weapons in their hands they're realizing because you don't have anything physically pushing against you this is actually causing a problem this actually wasn't helping gamepl it was hindering it because already just having to hold a weapon with two hands there's already a slight disconnect there um especially with a two-handed weapon like a shotgun to adding the third element of something that you're supposed to brace against yourself it just didn't work out and you can see how that evolved and our raw data picture of Boss that he no longer has a stock on the shotgun specifically we redesigned uh the weapon we really enjoyed the weapon but we took that off of it to make it more friendly to gameplay because at the end of the day that's what we're trying to create is amazing gameplay experiences and

you'll notice with all of the weapons in raw data they are a little bit larger uh than life and again this goes to the usability factor uh you know we really wanted it to feel good to be uh just really slick to use and to to really get into using the weapon and not have to Fumble with the realities of using a weapon uh so this is one of the early key learnings that really influenced the rest of our development um so then probably the next biggest pillar that as a studio in particular on Raw data um the team really focused on was the concept of active VR and we were constantly asking ourselves what is active VR what are we trying to do here what are we trying to accomplish and with our products our experiences we really don't want to just sell immersion great but we also want to sell that active experience because we find for the most part there's a lot of great VR other products out there fantastic stuff but we find the VR products that get you to move your body to get you to move around um whether you're you know using two guns pointing

in different directions whether you're having to dodge enemies trying to hit you whether you're having to physically interact with objects the more we can get the player to move into VR the more physically active we can get for the most part we find players have more fun right so as much as possible a big Focus for raw data was get players moving make it an active VR experience because to us that really was the dream that's what we were focusing on is is really what active bring art sucks you into that experience so and part of part of this was just getting uh the closer that we could get the world to the player um the better so enemies are a little bit larger and imposing they get right up in your face uh we spent time with the robot enemies in the game uh you know we really get them up close and personal with you just so that you can really get a sense of that immersion and being part of the world as opposed to having them stay far back and do long range kind of interactions we certainly have some of that but but we we did we tone that down that's that's an excellent point in particular I don't know how you uh have played the game or of noticed but uh

another example of that besides enemies shooting at you far away again we find the closer we bring the enemies to you the more in your space they are the more fun it becomes the more real it becomes the more immersive it is and we do that across the board with having less enemies firing far away even if they fire far away they they're constantly moving toward you but even other things like the drones we have flying drones in the game and initially when uh the coders put those in they had them working just great but they were really high up and you were having to fight these battles with these drones really high above you and I'm like well that's great but um it's really not that much fun because they're so far away right and and it's not as much fun to be looking directly up at them so what I ended up doing was taking the volume in which they could fly and just bringing it down to the point where the drones will actually Buzz the player by their head and there's a lot of people now who just I we've seen a lot of posts of people breaking their lamps or ceiling fans of various things in particular when they're playing SAA and using her sword specifically the Drone buzzing by and whacking it out of the air and they couldn't do that if the drones were really high up so again that's another

example where the closer we bring the action to the player just the more immersive it is okay next slide so here we uh I also want to talk about not only are we pursuing active VR and making the player active and and all the things that Mike just spoke about but the social side of VR we are True Believers in there's been certainly a lot of talk at least early on about how VR is isolated dating and and all of this well we don't believe that whatsoever and in fact we found quite the opposite uh Co-op play was really Central to uh to our approach from the very beginning uh you could almost call it a core mechanic of ours we've always really been into a shared experience not you know not only do you get these great up close immersive experiences on your own but it's the value of that the excitement of that is exponentially increased when you can share that with a friend so Co-op uh is has been really

important uh you'll see that continue in things that seros does uh we even uh have some great social interactions in our showroom where you can communicate with other players before you actually get into matches and it's something that we will continue to build around uh it's something that really shouldn't be overlooked um because with with VR especially the market is so new and growing that if you can bring people together in any way whether it's Co-op or through other types of social interactions it only helps the entire industry and it helps with Word of Mouth for your game for anybody who's done you know work in the mobile space you and the Social Mobile space you may be familiar with the K Factor uh equation and how if you get somebody in your game and and they're talking about it and they can share it with friends that then that then increases your reach and we're finding the same type of thing here so social VR active VR both were very important early core tenants for servos and raw data yeah definitely and you can see that in the way people play the game in particular um as like Chris said we

didn't shy away from it early on we believed we still truly believe uh social experiences in VR can be greater than any other game or platform that's out there right now um as much as it's really fun whether you're you're sitting on the couch with a friend or you're on the internet and talking to them or typing with them whether it's on the headset or not there's just something magical about being in VR and when you're playing a game and the person materializes in front of you and he's moving his arms and he's talking to you and you're looking at him and he's looking at you there's just no other experience like that in other gam so we actually we're firm Believers that having that full Avatar embodiment is a much more social experience than in any other platform to date great so what happened next around this time we showed the game off at vrla and GDC last year got tremendous feedback and realized that we really had a strong core game to build upon but we also realized that we needed something more than what was just a set of core mechanics right as great as they were we

needed more than what could be labeled uh sort of a demo experience we wanted something that really did embrace the AAA premium game uh sort of moniker that we could go with premium pricing on and all these things and something that would provide a full gameplay Loop for the players so this is the time when the metag game sort of made its way in into the game Mike did a great job with uh several elements as did James uh putting in a strong narrative you got a sense of that in the trailer can't understate how important that is to bringing the world to life um also introducing things like an Nexus and Tower Defense if you want to talk any about yeah other mechanics I think that's a good point too is there are fantastic um other VR experiences out there I mean we down them and play them all just like everybody else and have a great time with them um but a lot of the experiences while they're uh a lot of fun they're they're short experiences right they'll last a good you know 15 20 minutes maybe an hour and we knew with raw that wasn't enough for us right we

didn't want people just playing once twice or for you know 2 hours we wanted them to get a full 8 10 plus I mean how we have some people that have 50 plus hours on Raw data it's incredible um but that was a big Focus for us is to make sure we had an experience that players could keep coming back to in VR and that every time you release new content there's always a reason for them to keep coming back to try it out try something new and experience something a lot of replay value that you don't typically get a lot of the other experiences right now uh then so moving on to Locomotion that was us another big thing we had to figure out from the beginning so for those of you have played raw data or for those you have we have a slide here showing you the concept of what we called teles shifting so we knew from the beginning actually the very first demo the team had of raw data um characters were stationary not that they couldn't move but you were had your platform in in the center and you had your both characters or Co-op but you were kind of stuck to wherever you could physically walk to um and that was a really fun uh starting experience great prototype you know we're really focusing

on the gameplay the you know the guns the shooting the the melee and all that we just felt it was too limiting it was just too we knew for the beginning this is just too limiting we wanted players to explore the envir we have these amazing artists right who are making all these fantastic props and models and everything and these incredible environments and you were restricted you couldn't see them and you just wanted to and also it also really hampered gameplay I mean the fact that you know an enemy would back up or he would be you want to run to him rather than wait for him to come to you so we knew from the beginning we really needed to have Locomotion is part of that we couldn't accept stationary as we couldn't we didn't see a full game coming out of just stationary so that's when we focused on the uh the solution for teles Shifting the reason why we went this route uh for raw data at least our first product released is that we wanted to ensure there was no nausea that was a big belief from the beginning we make experiences do that do not make people sick in any capacity everyone should be able to enjoy it and have an amazing time so this is where working um with a lot of the coders working with Alex in particular um as our Tech lead on the project um really hammering down how we

make this teles shifting experience where one it doesn't make players sick two it uh very rapid it's very easy to use and then three um it allows you to feel like you're in the environment too many of the earlier uh VR experiences we had played with the teleporting experiences it felt like you were kind of blinking in and out of existence and we wanted to make it feel like you were actually moving from one location to another so all of those reasons we spent a lot of time focusing on this future then moving on to um the next big pillar so this is actually a lot of the conversations to Define what raw data was from the beginning um so going back to Bullet time Apex the early prototype the team had they solved great Mechanics for how to interact with things uh how to use weapons uh how to be in the VR space solve so many problems but um the early prototypes we had when we were playing I was like well this is fun I can use a shotgun I can use a bow I could use a pistol um but I could go do that in real life right I can go to a shooting range or experience of those things I can't fight robots in Real Life that's unfortunate um maybe in the future um but that was the big thing um

for myself uh joining the team early on is making sure well this is cool but I want more right I'm in VR to do something that I just can't experience in real life that promise of VR right and to to me for Raa that mean being that hero being that badass character we all have our favorite heroes or superheroes whether it's the Avengers or someone from a sci-fi movie or aliens or any of these things and we wanted you to live that experience right like you are in the movie you in your favorite book you're in your favorite TV show so that was a huge Focus the beginning is to adding Powers adding abilities amping it up taking this above and beyond just uh the basic weapons which are already very fun so that gave us an incredibly rich full game uh with which to work on and in order to get there to accomplish all of these things we really had to step back while the team the majority of the team was off at GDC uh you know showing off the game and the production team stayed back and really dug through the

scope of the game we did that with the leads as well and we took the time uh we took a couple of weeks to really hone down what the scope and the schedule was with the goal of as soon as the team was back from GDC and had settled back in that we had an entire road map that would get us to Early Access and would really Encompass all of these uh core mechanics and the metagame features uh in a way that we could get there um so that was that was pretty important for us up until this point R had been in production for about um 8 months or so I would say we were about a year all together before we went into Early Access so this was just good and getting the team on on the same page the sort of the takeaway here is that we used GDC uh the time that most of the team was away uh as an opportunity to hunker down and do some of the more production production wonky stuff and build out the schedule um and that way the team was able to come back and and hit the ground running so so being able to find those natural breaks uh that that your team is

already uh focused on something else is a great way to keep the momentum going where you don't have to sort of sit idle uh while you're resc scoping or figuring out schedules um so we had our schedule we were on track we got you know ready to launch the game into Early Access and we then had to decide decide what would our launch timing be so sounds like a simple question you know the game's ready you just launch it well we could have done that uh we also could have launched it over Fourth of July weekend a long weekend seems like that might make sense people have extra time to play games if they're not with their families um or we could try to do something else so one of the things that uh we really believe in at cios as well is not only do you look inward but you can look outward uh for guidance so what does that mean in this case we reached out to our platform partners and we reached out to Hardware partners that we had been working with and we involved them in the conversation

around launch timing and you know why why would you do that you may ask well it was really helpful for us because we were advised that some of that our existing plans would have had us come out during the middle of the Steam summer sale and uh if we were to do that there is no way that we could have received any sort of support uh from the steam store around launch not that there was any guarantee that we would get support if we launched later but there was definitely a guarantee we would get nothing if we launched during the summer sale so we would have walked right into a situation where we just would have shot ourselves in the foot in the in the sense of Partners being able to help promote for us so I really recommend whenever you're looking to launch not only look inwardly but talk to your partners your your platform uh Partners in particular and develop that relationship don't just speak with them when you're ready to launch uh we tend to visit with our partners at least once a quarter if not more get some FaceTime

um no one ever wants to see you only when you're asking for something so that probably labored that point yeah but I think that's the important thing to to acknowledge that uh VR in particular right now it's it's not as mainstream as giant console games with enormous budgets that are going to be at Walmart and Target and to not fight that to just embrace it and accept it as a much more of an indie atmosphere and mindset so um having those relationships with your with your partners whether it's on steam or doless store or Playstation however whatever approach that you're going um it's very important you acknowledge how your users are going to find you and making sure that there's a Time window where your partners can help them find you right because it's it's very much an explorative driven system at this point well said well said so now that we had our launch timing we had to figure out what price should we sell the game at and again we had several options here we could sort of we looked around at what was happening in the market uh we could price at the same sort of range that most most of the other games were priced at uh we could go for something lower we

could go for something higher we had a lot of debate and discussion internally we also Enlisted the aid of our partners and decided in the end to pursue a premium pricing model because we not only did we really believe in the product uh that we had a premium level product we saw some of the supply and demand uh that was playing out within the in the marketplace that there was a vacuum for the premium content pricing but if you looked at the demographics of the the users they tended to be on the higher end people that could afford premium pricing for the right product and uh you can always you you can never raise your price once you've set it it's just a simple pricing Dynamic but you can always come down you can do sales so it gave us room to work in case the market did not respond the way that we thought it would fortunately it did and uh not only did it respond uh as we thought it responded much better than we could have hoped for and I think that's it's also just a choice internally we made is we wanted to make a premium product right it's us we could have made

smaller bite-sized products right um but we specifically were acknowledging we wanted to make a full game for our users right something that they would cherish and clearly the market is is is wants this content they want premium content so you want to talk quickly about updates uh yeah so um just to talk a little bit about this I know we're running short on time here so um starting at the beginning we knew we made the conscious Choice as a team we wanted to do Early Access a lot of this is because we just didn't know how the community was going to respawn just to be totally honest right uh brand new hardware uh brand new uh systems for everybody we had to figure that out so we we released early and then um you know we started getting feedback right away from the community which is fantastic and let me tell you the team bent over backwards um to respond to the community as fast as they possibly could not just with hot fixes for bugs but for additional features a little tweaks here and there um you know our our coders our artists our designers all stayed really late and work their butts off and then we quickly realized were burning the team out responding too rapidly to

Consumers and while we were making a few people here and there really happy um it was hurting the longevity of the product and we knew we wanted to again premium content premium product so we had to space that out instead of going from releasing every two weeks to at some point releasing once a month to eventually we realized we wanted to put a bulk of the content together and relas every 3 months because no matter how we did it every time you release there's a price you have to pay internal production Price Right fixing bugs stabilizing optimizing so the further we could SPAC that out the more efficient the team became and honestly the bigger bang of content releases is actually better for the consumers we find at the end of the day they're far more interested when you release a whole bunch of content at once rather than just streaming it out so quar early updates they've worked great for us and in addition uh Community the community has been fantastic for raw data and part of that is are at least we can't take credit for a great Community they're awesome people but the uh from very early on it was important that we engage with our community so some of the

decisions that we made from the beginning and and this isn't lip service we really bought into this early we resourced up properly for it have Community managers right out of the get-go um one of the key decisions we made I think that helped us is we resisted the urge to sort of build our own set of forums and try to drive people to a new place we went to where the fans already were and we actually tailored that down just to two channels we focused on driving people to our steam page and the forums that are there and we also uh engaged on Reddit because that's where the two most active communities were uh makes no sense to try to move people off of that and uh that proved to be a big big success for us yep all right uh another thing to talk about uh coming up for uh for raw data for those of you who haven't heard already um we have a new content release coming out uh in March very excited about that uh we're going to have a new Mission uh our two characters SAA and BOS can have a

whole bunch of SL new powers which we're very excited about because those they weren't previously finished but probably one of the bigger things is we are not just supporting uh the rift completely we are actually fully crossplatform play compatible so now all users whatever platform they're on of those two platforms they'll be able to go online play Call up with their friends it doesn't matter what system they're on the community is just going to grow larger and larger as these uh it's one Community not two separate ones yeah again the social aspects of VR we want to try to bring all the VR players together into the same ecosystem so that you don't have to worry about trying to find friends to play with and you can really build things up get the word of mouth um and that's pretty much it so I think we have a couple of minutes to take some questions afterwards I know Mike and I will be out in the little reception Lounge area outside to take further questions yep and we also have our booth for you those una aware it's what number 944 944 so Wednesday through uh Friday we'll have our booth please swing by we'll be there happy to answer any other questions you might have yes on Raw data and we also are showing a

sneak peek at our another upcoming game so all right that's it great thank you good job mik I think we literally have one minute so yeah we can stretch hello hi quick question um are you going to have like a least common denominator play space or you going to adapt to the different um uh no um so basically uh what on either platforms you can play full 360 but we made specific um developments for those users who only have two cameras if they're on the Rift system um so we built a new tech and to support that so it w it won't matter which one you're using yeah so what was the biggest challenge you had in terms of limiting the player from trying to physically move around the room versus actually teleporting and before you answer the question I have tell you my college age daughter came home her comment and her boyfriend's comment playing it was whole holy science has gone way too far this is

ridiculous thank you yeah well uh that's thanks to our our brilliant team you know our cters or designers and artists have just done a phenomenal job on the product so yes players walking into the environment using the environment was a big debate internally um you know initially we had some systems that were preventing the player from physically putting their arms into things or physically walking into wall would stop them um we had to reverse course and go a different direction than that because we found that it would cause nausea for some people stop at a wall so that again no nausea policy we're not going to let players get sick um so instead what we ended up doing is we realized once players if they stick their head in the wall or something we just turn the screen red we start damaging them after a few seconds once they realize oh and we turn disable their buttons so they realize oh I can't actually walk in a wall nothing works they just stop doing it almost immediately they don't do it more than once I wanted to know what are some specific things you did to drive Community engagement to steam and in Reddit that really worked so we uh we've done a number of things

we've done some great cross promotions with other VR titles um and we're going to look for Roger right there what was the the cross we did the cross promotions with yeah it's called free key Friday and we've done a really fun Bas rec room experiments okay cool I would say um talk to Roger who's up front here and he he's part of our marketing team they're a fantastic group he'll be happy to help you with that but the yeah the free key Fridays have been really really good where we actually have skin draw data avatars in rec room uh we've done some other things where and we'll give away free keys to the game um constantly our our marketing team is online uh calling out either uh raw data players or different events that are happening um just a constant I mean it's social it's social media marketing basically so just a constant constant flow of Engagement with with the fans and on Reddit uh one of our Engineers internally is just like a super Reddit ftic and he's just on there all the time

uh as you know with Reddit you need authenticity to really connect with that audience and he already had a voice um so he was able to really be our Point person there so raw data was pretty successful in 2016 because it kind of stood out quality wise among the other experiences out there what do you think an VR experience or a VR game has to do in 2017 to stand out now um I would say again going back to what we said before it's premium content um there are so many Fantastic experiences out there um but some of them can be you know sometimes derivative or you know Sim too similar to other stuff um players love VR the VR Community they're they're super excited they're super enthusiastic we see it all the time if you make something great they're going to flock to it is as least our observations right so players really want high quality products um and again it's also going back to one of the other points before one of the pillars of data was be that Superhero be that badass right do

something have all these powers and abilities that you can't do in real life so I would encourage other developers out there besides making premium content give users an experience that they can't have in real life do something that they can only do when they're in VR and I think and think the players are there and they're just waiting for that content all right thanks thank you all right I think that's it great thanks everybody thank you