Gear VR was the 'Evolve' and 'Left 4 Dead' studio's savior

Facebook's aggressive investments in VR help keep Turtle Rock's lights on.

"Chaotic." That's how Turtle Rock Studios president Steve Goldstein described the 14 months between its last AAA game, Evolve, being effectively killed and now. The four-hunter-versus-one-gigantic-monster online multiplayer game struggled to retain players after it was released for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in early 2015.

Last June, Evolve transitioned from a $60 game to a free-to-play one. As a result, it went from roughly 100 players per month to more than 15,000. You'd think that would have been enough to keep the lights on, but you'd be wrong. Four months later, publisher 2K Games pulled the plug, saying that while the servers would remain online for the foreseeable future, the game wouldn't be getting any more updates.

"It was absolutely looking bleak, but sadly that's not unusual in our space," Goldstein said. "Everyone who works here knows that they are taking a risk, right? That's not a problem unique to us."

If all you've paid attention to are headlines on gaming and tech news sites, you'd think that Turtle Rock has been on the ropes ever since. But in the last year or so, thanks to Oculus' aggressive investments in virtual reality games and other experiences, Turtle Rock has been quietly building a mobile VR safety net in case its next $100 million project goes the way of Evolve.

"We knew we needed to do something besides being a one-game studio," Goldstein said. The team had developed a relationship with Oculus' current VP of content Jason Rubin while he was at THQ, the now-defunct original publisher for Evolve.

After chatting with Rubin at his new Facebook-sponsored digs and finding out what Oculus was looking for, Turtle Rock put together Other Worlds, a quiet, meditative experience that places you inside a trio of gorgeous 360-degree panoramas. It's not really a game in the traditional sense -- you're stuck in place, for one -- but it gave Oculus enough confidence in the studio to let it keep experimenting.

Turtle Rock's next project, 2016's Face Your Fears, was a little more traditional. It's a free-to-play jump-scare game that puts you in situations like a prop plane whose engine started sputtering or a child's bedroom where malevolent clown dolls fall off bookshelves and closet doors open and slam shut. So far it's racked up 1.6 million downloads -- almost double the number of players Evolve had at its free-to-play peak. That isn't lost on the team.

Studio co-founder and design director Chris Ashton said that there was pressure to succeed with VR given the Left 4 Dead creator's AAA lineage. "We're always proud of the product we deliver, so the expectation was that we would basically go into VR and we would kick ass," he said.

Which brings us to the team's latest project, The Well. Throughout our conversation, the team kept referring to The Well as its "first" VR game despite its prior work in the space, and the team hopes it's a lot of players' first role-playing game in general.