Poker has long been viewed as a perfect fit for VR for many reasons. For one, it was designed to be a game that is at its best when its players can see one another. With VR, it’s relatively easy to simulate a poker room, and players can quickly learn how to play on the virtual felt. This relative authenticity and shallow learning curve are what made VR poker one of the early trials for the modern technology.

Many poker games have tried to fashion a hit VR poker game. There’s Gangsta Underground: The Poker with its attention-grabbing storyline and PokerStars’s immersive virtual world. The uniqueness of each game shows just how much potential VR poker games have to be great.

 

However, neither of these titles — along with other VR poker games available on the market today — have really taken off. So what might a hit VR poker game actually look like?

Online Multiplayer

Players are looking for more than exhibition games and one-offs in their poker games. A top VR game would need to replicate real-life poker’s sophisticated and extensive progression structure through games and tournaments. This would help prevent VR poker titles from having repetitive gameplay, something which can cause players to feel that the game is getting too stale too fast. Ultimately, it can increase player retention while also bringing VR poker one step closer to the real thing. It can also add to the social gaming aspect of VR that we believe make it more unique than other platforms. In our article on social VR, we listed PPPoker’s global network of social players as a standout example.

Beginner Help

Many VR poker games assume that their players already know how to play by virtue of real or online poker. Yet they can open themselves up to a much larger player base if they instead make things easier for beginners. A lot of skilled players ultimately learn to calculate the odds in poker as they play. For beginners who haven’t developed this skill, a popular VR game will need an amateur mode that flashes tips and advice. While waiting for VR poker games to roll out full-fledged tutorial modes, though, beginners can always turn to YouTube for advice.

 

Ultra-Realistic Poker Environments

Players currently can’t read the expressions on the faces of VR poker avatars. However, it should be the eventual goal. Poker is so much about bluffing and concealing with our bodies, and this may be why we’ve yet to see a true big-hitter for poker in the VR field. Thankfully, major VR companies continue to work on creating more expressive VR avatars, so features that let you read bluffs — and bluff yourself — can become reality in the near future. For now, current VR technology can mimic your movements pretty closely, so you can go as far as reading your opponent’s body language.

Fully-Customisable Player Avatars

If we can’t actually look like ‘ourselves’ in VR poker, the next best thing would be fully-customisable player avatars. What subtle hints might it give off about you if you play as a confident-looking cowboy? Might other players expect you to bluff, when in reality you play a conservative game? An avatar with a sincere face might throw rivals off your aggressive tactics. VR leader Oculus now allows us to do just that. You can now customise virtually any facial feature on Oculus avatars, including wrinkles. However, this advancement is yet to be integrated into today’s top VR poker titles.

As pointed out above, the tech for ultra-realistic environments isn’t quite there yet — and this might be what’s currently keeping VR games from taking off. However, ongoing developments in VR technology are promising, and we can expect hit VR poker games to emerge in the near future.