Front Defense is HTC’s first internally developed game

VR platform holder HTC is making its debut as a games developer with new VR title Front Defence.

The title will be shown off at Taiwan’s Computex trade show next week, VentureBeat reports. The title is a tower defence game with players holding out against increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

As the site points out, as a hardware manufacturer HTC was previously positioned to miss out on a revenue share of the software market, as all of HTC Vive’s games are sold through its partner Valve’s Steam store. Making its own games opens the door to a share of these revenues.

HTC has also unveiled a new initiative called the Vive X fund which will pump $100m of investment into VR development across a range of partners working on VR productivity apps and tools. Again, this places HTC in a position to start seeing some returns from software sales.

At the root of this change, VentureBeat argues, is HTC’s experience in the Android phone market, where its elbowing out at the hands of Samsung and others left it high and dry. The wider its net is cast in the VR sector, the safer its future is perceived to be.