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John Carmack encourages VR devs to 'embrace the grind'

"It takes more than just 'be bold'," the Oculus CTO said today during a 2-hour presentation at Oculus Connect in which he encouraged VR devs to iterate on, optimize, and polish up their games.

Alex Wawro, Contributor

October 12, 2017

1 Min Read
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"Embrace the grind...It takes more than just 'be bold'; you have to actually work really hard. You've gotta fill your products with 'give a damn.'"

- John Carmack, speaking about the state of VR dev at Oculus Connect 4.

Oculus CTO and veteran game dev John Carmack kicked off the closing day of Oculus' Connect dev conference today with a two-hour treatise on the state of VR.

The recording of that talk is worth watching if you're curious to get a peek at the VR market through Carmack's eyes. He touches on a variety of topics during his monologue, most notably his belief that the building blocks of mass-market VR are now in devs' hands -- they just need time to iterate on their creations.

"It actually feels like all of the pieces, all of the ingredients that we need, are already really here, they're just not stirred, cooked, and seasoned," said Carmack, early on. "Not many of our applications [in the Oculus store] are going that extra mile where all the really important magic and user value happens."

He went on to encourage devs to put in work on optimizing their VR games, especially for mobile VR headsets, and offered some suggestions on how to do it effectively. We've taken the liberty of embedding the full video above (Carmack takes the stage at about the ten-minute mark) but you can also find it and other videos out of Connect on Oculus' YouTube page.  

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