Mighty Eyes Co-Founder Sam Ramlu on why virtual reality’s time has finally come

The virtual reality market has seen multiple false starts, but one Kiwi startup is betting the technology is finally going mainstream and wants to be on the ground floor when it does. 

Mighty Eyes Studios, creator of AIXR VR game of the year finalist Wanderer, is seeking a million-dollar raise to finance its next projects, an updated and modernised remake of the game and its sequel.  

Mighty Eyes have chosen an innovative route for funding this time, using crowdfunding investor platform Snowball Effect.

“It allows the public to come in and, for a nominal amount, get into investment. It’d be an opportunity for New Zealanders to get behind a local game studio and say they’ve got a part in that success and future growth,” Mighty Eyes Founder Sam Ramlu told Caffeine.

Video game studios seeking investment typically enter an arrangement with a publisher, who helps fund game development, marketing, and distribution in return for a meaty cut in profits - up to 50%. 

Ramlu says with current economic conditions, publishers and traditional investors don’t necessarily have the risk appetite for a VR venture.  

“Like anyone, they’re sticking to what they know, and VR is unfamiliar to a lot of them,” she said. 

“They want to see that grow a little bit more. We were looking at some other opportunities, and we were approached by Snowball and thought this was actually quite a unique offering; this is not a typical raise in New Zealand.” 

Unique because Mighty Eyes is New Zealand's only dedicated VR gaming studio and have already proven it can deliver on the global stage. 

“We were up for VR game of the year. It’s insane, in a space where we’ve got some massive players, we’ve got so much money being poured into this and we’re up for VR game of the year, not just an indie game. We’ve had some amazing games come out of New Zealand, but at that level, it’s still really unique.”

The video game market is already a $300 billion dollar global behemoth, bigger than movies and music combined, but the nascent virtual reality sector makes up only a fraction of this. 

VR game revenues are expected to double from $1.8 billion in 2023 to $3.2 billion by 2024 as the install base grows.

Mighty Eyes bets that as that base grows, the market for VR experiences like Wanderer will explode. She points to a recent survey showing 30% of US teens own some form of VR headset.  

To optimists like Ramlu, VR will then follow the exponential growth of mobile gaming, which has almost doubled in value since 2017 and now makes up almost half of the global gaming market.

She isn’t alone in this assessment. Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on creating a shared virtual world in the ‘Metaverse’. Apple has entered the fray with its Apple Vision Pro (albeit to very sluggish sales) and Google recently resurrected its ‘Google Glass’ programme to explore augmented reality. 

And the potential for VR goes well beyond gaming, with augmented and virtual reality systems potentially transformative in education and healthcare. ‘

A study from Harvard Business Review showed that VR-trained surgeons had a 230% boost in their overall performance compared to their traditionally trained counterparts.

Outside of this initial raise, Ramlu hopes to leverage Mighty Eyes’ experience in this emerging market to create a SaaS product sellable to other VR studios. 

Mighty Eyes is developing a proprietary VR framework, VRAF, a suite of tools and systems that can enable 40% time-saving in VR game production, massively reducing costs. 

“If we think about that as a commercial opportunity that’s quite unique in itself, there are no other studios out there who do this; we’re probably the only ones at the moment who are looking to actually commercialise it,” says Ramlu.  

Whether betting on VR in 2024 is innovative or overeager remains to be seen, but with Silicon Valley pouring Billions into VR tech year after year, if Ramlu is wrong on this one, she’s wrong in some excellent company.