Will More People Play Job Simulator With Hand Tracking Than Controllers?

Given how prominently Owlchemy Labs pushes hand tracking controls, we had to ask during an interview at Gamescom.

It’s a thought that comes to mind given how Dimensional Double Shift is hand tracking only, while Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator both received updates to support this post-launch. With that said, does Owlchemy’s head, Andrew Eiche, think the studio’s games will be played by more people through hand tracking in the next five years than with controller tracking in the last nine?

“I hope so. I want to believe so,” he said, unable to avoid a pun. “I think that question is largely out of our hands.”

“I think what it really depends on is if the headsets can build traction. One of the biggest friction points I’m seeing is the desire of tech companies coming into contact with the people who are actually interested in XR. I want to be clear, Google, I’m not [disparaging] this, but some companies have this big idea that people are going to do their work in XR, and we just haven’t seen that play out.”

Eiche suggests that hand tracking is “the way to do the broadest appeal in VR right now.” He believes more users will continue preferring it because it’s a “simpler” option, noting how Steam has experimental support while PlayStation VR2 games with hand-tracking support began appearing earlier this year.

We shouldn’t expect hand tracking on the PS VR2 versions of Job Simulator or Vacation Simulator anytime soon, though. Eiche confirmed there still isn’t a direct pathway in Unity to support hand tracking on PlayStation VR2 yet, stating Aldin Dynamics used its own middleware solution for Waltz of the Wizard.

“That’s a pretty heavy lift, and we’re just not ready to take that up.”

Continuing further, Eiche believes “late Gen Z and early Gen Alpha” are becoming more VR native, pointing to Dimensional Double Shift and Gorilla Tag as being extremely different games but “dead aligned on the social side.” He said Dimensional Double Shift beta’s success metric was 20,000 downloads; Owlchemy reached 200,000 downloads and maintains regular monthly users.

“People are still downloading the game. They’re still enjoying it. We’re making updates. What you often see in flat games is where you get this huge burst of users, and then immediately the cliff drops and you have nobody. You only have your super core audience. So now, we need to not shoot ourselves in the foot.

“There’s an entire generation that’s there for the taking, and it’s up to one of these headset manufacturers to have the courage to be like, “Hey, yeah, we should make sure that we hit this VR native generation.”