Oculus Rift was already available to the public as a developers kit, however there’s finally a release date for the official product. It will be launched finally on the first trimester of 2016, a little less than a year from now. An official release is different than the development kit in many ways, as the design of the product and its specifications may change accordingly.

Rumors also say that there’s a possibility that the Oculus Rift may also be compatible with Playstation 4 and Xbox One, however it seems unlikely that it happens, with Sony’s Project Morpheus and Microsoft’s HoloLens, it doesn’t make sense that neither company support a direct competition product on their own consoles when both are also developing VR products.

There will be more news about the Oculus Rift on the following weeks and we’re hoping to see the official specifications very soon.

Today we’re starting the week with some big news. Do you know what Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Devil may Cry, Bioshock and Fable have in common? They share the same base engine: Unreal Engine, developed by Epic Games.

Until yesterday to be able to develop in the Unreal Engine you had to pay a monthly subscription of about 20 euros more or less, but that’s over. According to their blog and website, Unreal Engine 4 is completely free for everyone!

Is there any tricks? No, you really don’t pay anything to work on the engine, however there’s someone you have to know. If your game gets popular, you have to pay 5% of the revenues when you manage to reach a 3000 euros profit. After that, each quarter of the year you have to pay the 5% revenues.

If you make a big AAA game, 5% of millions of euros may be a little expensive, but if you don’t manage to hit it big, you don’t have to worry about subscriptions, neither you have to worry about future updates since everything is free.

At this moment there are already quite some VR goggles announced, some already available and some others still in development. However not everyone has the possibility to buy them, since the best ones are usually expensive.

However Razer is launching their own pair of VR goggles, and they couldn’t be cheaper for what they offer. A $200 Razer OSVR (which stands for Open Source Virtual Reality) has some nice especifications, such as a 1920×1080 FullHD display and runs up to 60fps. Accelerometer, gyroscope and many other extras are included for full experience.

This headset is being released in June and it should support Unreal Engline and Unity 3D right from the launch. Another nice feature is the possibility to change parts, with all the advantages that can offer.

As more games and more headsets are released to the public, the less reasons we have to have a pair of VR goggles at home. Its very early to tell, but VR should be the new standard way of playing videogames in a few years from now.

Today we’ll talk about an issue very important for developers and companies: how to correctly publish your games. Its quite obvious which games are most successful. They have good names, a great description, some very teasing images and vídeos… and many developers forget these kind of details that may cost months of work if they simply publish their game without caring about their game page.

First, the name must be very good, and when we say “very good”, we mean short but that describes perfectly the game. A game called “The Adventure of the Knights of the Round Table” is much less appealing as “Knights Adventure”, for example.

The description is equally important, but you need to have one thing in mind: not many people read it, they tend to focus on the images instead. And even who do read, they just read the first 2 or 3 lines, so this should be the main focus. Describe the game, write something that can convince people to download your game.

The icon is one of the most important details when releasing your game. Anywhere on Google Play and App Store, the cover of your game is its name and icon. A great looking icon is appealing enough for people to open your game page.

Screenshots should be also one of the details you should focus the most. Show ingame footage, but don’t forget to add some text to your screenshots. Use it like you’d like to use the description section, however don’t add too much text or the same happens: people won’t read.

Your game’s score and ratings are also very important, especially in the beginning. It’s the first opinions that catapult the game either up or down. See it this way, if a new game is launched and has a few 5/5 reviews, it will most likely attract many more downloads than a game with 3/5 or even 2/5 reviews.

After launching the game, doing some updates is also important for several reasons: it makes people play your game for longer, makes the game more visible for newcomers and also allows you to get fame as a company / developer that supports his games even after launch. Fans will follow you and your next game will already have more reviews than the last one.

These are some tips you really should consider when launching your game. We also want to share with you a very detailed article about strategies to follow to release apps that is very worth checking out and goes more detailed on some of the points we mentioned.