VR Dating Games Offer Huge Earning Potential to the VR Industry

Image Credit: Kirill Karev/Medium

If you are wondering whether or not VR Gaming is all about the power-packed action games and immersive-rich graphic-content, let me tell you that’s certainly not the case! The VR gaming industry is evolving rapidly and the technology is maturing every day. However, statistics suggest that it is ‘VR Dating Games’ that have helped the VR industry earn the maximum moolah.

Independent contributor at Medium and founder of VR Dating simulator ‘DREAMGIRL,’ Kiril Karev, shares some jaw-dropping insights on how VR Dating games are presenting serious competition to other action-based VR games.

Make Some Love With VR Dating

VR Dating is a particular genre of virtual reality Games wherein the gameplay involves developing a relationship with a hot virtual chic. Such games involve getting into a daily conversation with the virtual girl, doing some tasks for her and finally take this relationship to the level of sexual intimacy.

Such games have different levels and your progress in it depends on how quickly you do the tasks for her and carry out all her favors. Two of the most hot-selling games in this genre are Summer Lesson and VR Kanojo.

Summer Lesson is a PlayStation exclusive game and developed specifically for Sony’s hot-selling PSVR headsets. Here your role is to play a tutor to a cute young girl, Hikari Miyamoto, and help her achieve good grades in her exams. This game aims to cultivate a more gentle relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiXSe0oIGn0

While on the other hand, VR Kanojo works on a somewhat similar theme but has got some intimate tasks which even involves taking your girl to the bed for some erotic fun. Watch the two trailers and decide your best pick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snvc56GtNsM

Stats Favour VR Dating

One of the easiest ways to determine this is the number of views on YouTube. Kirill Karev compares the above two VR Dating Games with two other very popular adult VR games: Arizona Sunshine and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope.

Below is a comparison chart that shows the total number of views for the first 15 results and is sorted by the total view counts. Note that this comparison is done while taking into account factors like launch time of the game, view count, and available on widely used Vive and Rift platforms.

Image Credit: Kirill Karev/Medium

From the above comparison chart, it is clear that in spite of VR Kanojo having the least videos and limited presence, it still manages to grab a larger share (almost 3 times) of views in comparison to Arizona Sunshine. In fact, even Summer Lesson has more views than the first person shooter games.

VR Dating Games Offer Huge Earning Potential

So, here we come back to the main point regarding how much VR Dating Games are contributing in terms of the earning potential? To discuss this, Kirill uses some comparison metrics and projections to bring the comparison on fair and equal grounds.

According to the developers, Arizona Sunshine had hit a $1.4million jackpot in its very first month of sales. So considering its $40 pricing, this amounts to approximately 35000 copies being sold.

The VR Dating Games, basically being centric to the Japanese markets, there is no absolute data for it. So let us make some assumptions on fair grounds. Below is the chart of the site traffic of VR Kanojo. Consider this breakdown to be the sales for Summer Lesson.

Image Credit: Kirill Karev/Medium

Market analysis shows that Summer Lesson has sold over 27,000 copies in its first month of launch. Now Summer Lesson being available only in Japan, from the above graph, we can say that 27000 copies contribute to 62% of sales. So the revenues from Japan itself stands at 27,000 * $28 = $756,000.

So if 38% sales are from other countries, it means a total of 16,548 copies sold generating a revenue of 16,548 * $28 = $463,344 outside Japan. This totals to a $1.2 million earning for Summer Lesson in the very first month. Quite close enough to Arizona Sunshine.

Considering another projection for a “Steam” scenario that if the developers of the game would have dedicated resources of PR and marketing overseas, the sales outside of Japan would have translated nearly 1.5 times larger making it to 57% instead of 38%. This shows that the overall revenue would have shot up to approximately $1.7 million.

Image Credit: Kirill Karev/Medium

Conclusion

The above analysis makes us safely believe that VR Dating Games have a great earning potential, given a chance to be released on a larger global footprint. Currently, the Japanese market is said to be a big hub for the VR Dating and VR Porn games as most game developers, specifically in this genre, are from Japan. However, the above chart of site traffic at VR Kanojo website shows that there is a considerable growing interest from consumers in other countries as well. If taken seriously, VR Dating and CGI sex could soon turn to be hot-selling in the global markets.