There's a big difference between the two, though: The latter is free, whereas The Well costs $5. Goldstein chalks that up to the fact that the GearVR platform as a whole caters toward casual consumers who don't spend money on games and likely got their headset as part of a promo. For him, releasing The Well on GearVR was an experiment.

"We wanted to see how much of our audience that we currently have would would potentially convert" to paying for a game, Goldstein said. One tactic for that is advertising The Well within Face Your Fears to see if that will give it a sales bump. Goldstein is counting on the all-in-one Oculus Go to be the "full-blown launch" of The Well and where the game finds its player-base. He said that at that point, people will have paid $200 for the headset so they'll be primed to buy games for it, increasing the likelihood that they'll spend more than just a few minutes in VR.

The game's current sales don't mean that the team is moving on and going back to the cheap thrills a free jump-scare game provides. They also don't mean Turtle Rock is going to abandon VR and return to making games for platforms like PC and consoles where the studio's reputation alone is enough to attract players. Beyond re-learning game design fundamentals like player locomotion, VR allows Turtle Rock to rebuild its reputation from scratch too.

Goldstein spoke of a 50-something Swedish woman who loves filming herself getting frightened by playing Face Your Fears; she then uploads the footage to YouTube. "I can guarantee you she's never heard of Evolve or Left 4 Dead," he said. "She's awesome." But isn't that frustrating? Spending 15 years building a name as a studio only to have to start from scratch with a new audience?

"I think it's liberating, actually," said art director Justin Cherry. There are a few reasons for that. For one, it gives the studio a chance to make its name mean something for an entirely new audience that otherwise wouldn't have heard of it. It makes sense from a business perspective too. If the studio's pitching a first-person shooter to a typical publisher, almost everyone is going to take a meeting with the Left 4 Dead team. But if it's pitching an RPG like The Well that might not be the case.