Newsletter 
VR looks to be a big piece of the technology pie within the next 5 years, and more than a few companies have their hand in some form of VR development all looking to make profit from the VR boom everyone seems to believe is coming. Perhaps none are more invested than Valve though, who are working diligently on different areas of the VR market including the Vive Pre headset in partnership with HTC. For Valve, VR success (at least for right now) mostly isn’t measured in dollar signs. A successful evolution of virtual reality technology for Valve means supporting the VR developers and making sure they flourish to help better the future of VR as a whole.
Talking with Valve’s Chet Faliszeck, RoadToVR was able to gather the most important focus areas for Valve on VR and ultimately it boils down to taking care of the developers. Faliszeck, who is a developer himself, states that “we don’t want to see the developers get burned” when referencing how they want to see virtual reality succeed. Valve is accomplishing this by helping to fund the projects that third party developers are working on, as is HTC according to Faliszeck. Not only does this showcase that Valve seems to care an awful lot about the people creating content for the platform, but that they’re also confident in the work they’re doing if it means putting up money from their own coffers to make the content as successful and enjoyable as possible. Faliszeck even mentions that he’s excited about certain content that he is currently playing and that he enjoys playing it which speaks a lot to the nature of consumer potentially being just as excited.
Aside from helping to fund their third-party developer partners, Valve also believes that developers creating VR content for the SteamVR platform should be free to place their content elsewhere too. Faliszeck states that Valve has always encouraged their partners to make their games and content available on multiple platforms, and they’re sticking to that philosophy for virtual reality as well as Valve believes that the developers they’re currently working with on VR content should make their creations available on “every platform.” By locking partners down to SteamVR and SteamVR alone, the long-term goals for developers could end up in a worse position, which is exactly the opposite of what Valve is trying to do for everyone involved.