In an interview with Fortune, Sony's vice president of marketing, John Koller, says that PlayStation VR could play a role in Sony's future eSports plans. Koller says that Sony's eSports efforts begin with PlayStation 4 games such as Call of Duty and Street Fighter V, but that VR would be an interesting direction to explore.
"RIGS could be an opportunity for eSports," says Koller, in reference to Guerrilla Games mech-based first-person shooter, RIGS: Mechanised Combat League - a PlayStation VR exclusive. "It requires a few things to work. RIGS is best played with six players and it’s a real competitive type of situation. Not all games are developed that way, so we’ll just have to see what comes along."
RIGS seems perfectly fit for eSports, as the game's own fiction places it firmly in realm of a futuristic sport itself. This means match times and scoring are divided into eSports-friendly chunks, while the presence of spectators is built into the game world itself. On that spectator side, Guerrilla Games is building in a VR spectator mode, so that players who aren't currently in a match can watch other games in progress using their own PlayStation VR headset.
What this eSports potential really comes down to is how exciting the game is to watch - so that spectating capability is the key. How readable is the game state to a viewer? How exciting are the interactions between teams?
The game's lead designer, Gareth Hughes, says that they aren't designing the typical kind of twitch-based shooter that currently dominates the eSports scene. “There’s a huge amount of teamwork, and the orchestration of a competitive team is awesome to watch, but what we want to leverage from VR is a little less about the precision of controller skills. We can use the VR as an aiming technique, and it puts a much greater emphasis on strategy, tactics, and positioning. It gives us our own kind of identity."
That sounds readable, but it remains to be seen how exciting that will be to watch. What will RIGS' "wow" moments be? What will a clutch play look like? What will get us cheering for individual players? We'll find out after the PlayStation VR becomes available in October.
