Vreal is an immersive content platform that allows gamers to record content and upload for others to watch. Vreal was originally created to exclusively serve as a VR game content platform, but with the VR market somewhere between it’s trough of disillusionment and slope of enlightenment (search Gartner hype cycle if not familiar), many in the industry realized that it was missing the mark for expectations.
That realization lead the Vreal team down a path to 2D content. We started with adding a desktop mode viewing experience which allows viewers to watch VR game content in a 2D capacity but with similar movement capabilities.
I was a product manager on this project and helped establish the MVP as well as lead the influencer marketing initiatives.
Considerations
Some content (especially older content), could only be viewed in VR mode.
The decision to watch in either mode was a non-trivial amount of work to implement into the app itself.
Vreal was already well-established as VR exclusive so we needed to cleverly message these changes to users and the community at large.
MVP
Users can choose which viewing mode to watch in (VR or Desktop) via Steam on initial launch
Added control scheme and a way for users to find it (ESC to open)
Any content that could only be viewed in VR mode would not be displayed for desktop users
Control scheme menus and competitive analysis I created for this feature:
Marketing
I ran an influencer campaign for the release of Desktop Mode, working with a handful of influencers to spread the word. I hand-picked and worked with each individual to create unique content for their channel and used bitly links to track conversions. I also collaborated with our head of marketing on the messaging for our social media and created all of the assets for it, including the dev update video below.
This campaign doubled our userbase from 750 unique users over 90 days to 1,500. Our Twitter budget was $500 and produced over 250k impressions.