It would seem that the Frostbite engine will have VR support sooner rather than later. Over the weekend, Johan Andersson, Technical Director on Frostbite at Electronic Arts, tweeted that DICE is putting together a small team of people to work on VR projects.
The tweet included a link to the jobs page on DICE’s website, where there are five senior level virtual reality-related positions the company is looking to fill: Creative Director, Senior Technical Artist, Senior Software Engineer, Senior Gameplay Engineer and Senior Rendering Engineer.
The job description pages are very generic, almost as if copied and pasted from one another. The only insight into what the team will be doing is vague to say the least.
Thousands of game developers all over the world are using Frostbite to create games with our proprietary tools. They need efficient, robust and intuitive workflows in order to create awesome games!We have a small multi-disciplined team with Frostbite who will work on virtual reality projects and for that team we are now looking for a Sr Software Engineer.
The timing for these job postings is somewhat surprising. It has been less than a month since Electronic Arts’ Chief Financial Officer, Blake Jorgensen, spoke at the UBS Global Technology Conference, and as gamesindustry.biz reported, Jorgensen said the company would be waiting to see how the market for VR turns out before investing in the medium.
There's some challenges still and I think the biggest challenge is just the size of the market. We don't make games anymore for the Wii or the Wii U because the market is not big enough, the PS Vita - the Sony product - we don't make games for that anymore because the market is too small, so it's all about the size of the market," said Blake Jorgensen during the UBS Global Technology Conference.
With consumer grade virtual reality hardware just around the corner, it’s always good to see more companies embrace the new medium. Unreal Engine, Unity and CryEngine already offer toolsets for developing in VR, and it’s apparent that the highly popular Frostbite engine could join the list, though it is curious that the company would have such a quick change of heart.
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