Can Zenith Succeed?
Can Ramen VR keep up with a rapidly growing and evolving VR industry?
On September 26th, 2019, Ramen VR raised over 280,000$ for a virtual reality massively multiplayer online game titled Zenith. About two years later the same project raised an additional 10 million dollars in a Series A round. The 12-man studio has big dreams for Zenith, with a promise of a fully dynamic open world with deep combat, customization, AI, and social features. These are incredibly optimistic goals, especially for such a small team that relies on an unstable and rapidly changing/growing VR gaming industry. When I first found zenith on Kickstarter, I was incredibly skeptical, and over the course of this article, I will discuss the competition and challenges awaiting Zenith after launch.
Compared to traditional PC MMOs Zeniths 10 million dollars looks like pocket change as games such as Destiny, Elder Scrolls Online, and New World all have initial development costs well above 100 million dollars with additional millions spent updating the game following launch. Zenith financially can’t compete but it is not trying to. Zenith is specifically focused on appealing to VR users which have been a lucrative gamble for companies ever since 2016. Its current competition is with VRchat and OrbusVR far more than it is with desktop MMOs like World of Warcraft.
Back in June of this year, VRchat secured an 80-million-dollar series D funding round, totaling the companies outside investment to almost 100 million dollars. In terms of quantity and quality, VRchat and Zenith have very different approaches to content. VRchat relies almost solely on user-generated content, using a series of unity SDKs to allow users to generate games, avatars, and social spaces which then can be accessed from a desktop or VR application. By giving development tools to users as long as there are users there is a steady flow of new content, meaning Vrchat as a business spends very little annually on producing user experiences. VRchat also acts as a host to various events such as the annual Virtual Market and user-hosted events, such as meetups, festivals, and even online classes such as learning sign language and music theory. While VRchat has a wide variety of activities it lacks focus, ultimately there is no “end goal” or progression outside of adding as many friends as humanly possible and then beating them all in a virtual dance contest. While you can do virtually anything, your reward is nearly nothing. Through using this style of content generation VRchat averages over 12,000 active users per month.
Zenith, I believe, will have the exact opposite problem. Zenith has a full campaign, complete with side quests and public events, all of which reward the user with new weapons, armor, and money. All of which can be done while talking to your friends or random strangers you found to help you fight an overpowered overgrown spider. However, all this content is being made by a small VR game studio, which will inventively lead Ramen VR to face the same problem much larger teams face such as Bungie with Destiny 2. Destiny relies on annual expansions with 4 three-month-long seasons meant to help players survive the year-long wait. Despite Bungie having over 1200 employees destiny 2 still runs into periods the community calls “content droughts”, which are times throughout the year where the majority of players have experienced all the new content and are left waiting for the next season or expansion. These droughts are a result of the game development process, as players will be able to play through game updates at a far quicker pace compared to the time required to design, develop, test, and deploy the said update. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years of development and only takes 40-60 hours for a player to complete, creating a clear divide in time investment. I mention this only because Zenith will undoubtedly fall into the same problem, especially with such a small team in such a volatile market. Ramen VR has only 12 full-time employees, which is small even when compared to other VR studios such as Ready at Dawn (118 employees) and Vertigo games (82 employees). This small employee count will ultimately result in long “content droughts” in which users will leave Zenith for other entertainment options, resulting in less active players. Once most of the player base burns through any new content additions there will be little left to do other than wait for new content updates and expansions.
The VR industry moves fast, and games often can’t keep up. While in PC gaming a game from 2016 is just as enjoyable as one from 2021 the same can’t be said for VR. Back in 2016 VR was in its infancy with major industry players unsure of what works and what doesn’t in the brand-new entertainment medium. Over the last 5 years, VR standards for movement and player interactions have continued to change drastically with every new hardware and software iteration. If Zenith wishes to be a constant go-to game for years to come like Destiny and VRChat it will need to work smarter and harder than almost every other studio.
It might sound like I’m being a little pessimistic, so far Zenith has had 2 alphas and 1 beta that have been very successful, and the Ramen VR has done a good job showing how the game has been growing as it prepares for an early 2022 release, and yet here I am saying that there might not be a commercial and financial success for Zenith in the coming years. That’s because before Zenith came OrbusVR and Nostos, two VR MMOs that failed to adapt to a rapidly growing market. Nostos made many of the same promises Zenith did and yet after a buggy lackluster initial release its parent company NetEase decided to abandon the project and shut the servers down. Nostos had an incredibly short lifespan for an MMO, lasting only 18 months before being removed from the virtual marketplace Steam. OrbusVR, on the other hand, while still active, only averages 13 daily active users according to Steam, a result of poor adaptation to modern VR trends, minimal and far too uncommon content updates, and poor performance. Zenith right now looks like it will be a success, but so did OrbusVR and Nostos before release. Betting on Zenith’s success might not be such a safe bet as everyone wants to believe right now. MMOs are notoriously expensive, and plenty of promising projects like Zenith have proven to be too good to be true.
Yet despite all this, I still bought a collector’s edition of Zenith and have actively participated in every closed alpha and beta. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy almost every aspect of the game I was lucky enough to test and already I’ve had some unforgettable moments such as watching a group of half-naked men and women rushing forward into battle only to all die at the hands of a level 5 sylphid. The gameplay and social systems are excellent, even in the game’s current pre-release state, and I hope that when the game finally launches early next year that it will be the start of an amazing VR MMO that will entertain players for years to come.