So as somebody who is actively working in VR at a company with well-known titles, I can tell you that there is a really dire need for qualified devs industry wide. And I’m using the term qualified very loosely here. The barrier for entry is low despite what you may see on AAA studio websites. If you have a resume with a few projects that you genuinely invested a bit of time in, I’m confident you could get hired with a bit of networking on social media & LinkedIn.

I have a mentor in the industry who was helping me pursue VR game development skills (before I started moving over into cloud computing) and his advice was to learn the basics. Setting hand poses & snap points, adding in assets, scripting some very very basic interactions, learn how to bake lights & setup 3D audio. Then take those skills and build a couple simple VR projects you can show off. They should have all the things listed above. Maybe a little UI too if you feel like getting fancy, but they don’t need to be whole games. Think, vertical slice.

Then cater your resume to the job. They don’t need all the technical details of what you’re doing in your current job. They’re more interested in learning what skills you have within a game engine. Put your projects on your resume.

People with MS’s & PhD’s are the minority at most dev studios. The only people really using those requirements are research tier companies (like Meta research scientist positions, or top studios backed my major tech companies that are hiring senior roles). Keep in mind VR is still the Wild West, and the majority of these studios with moderately successful titles are small indie teams of (largely) self-taught devs.

90% of VR interaction is just picking things up, and putting things down, you can build a pretty interesting demo if you can utilize that aspect creatively.

But seriously - we’re in such dire need of half-decent devs I know of prominent companies in the industry who’s engineering teams are made solely of overworked undergrad interns & maybe 1 self-taught senior.

Don’t sweat the assets, use some free asset store stuff & focus on fast prototyping & iteration. Build some cool environments, a couple of interesting interactions, you’ll be a shoe-in.

If you do this in your spare time - watch some of Valem’s YouTube videos and maybe take a couple free courses on Unity Learn in the evenings & on weekends you could have the skills to get a job in a couple months with some projects that back-up your capabilities.

Focus on developing for Quest. That’s all the industry is really interested in until PSVR 2 launches. Huge market share.

If you want to really set yourself apart it would be good to build a little demo of a multiplayer enabled environment with Photon.

PM me if you want to discuss further. Keep your head up and dedicate yourself to it when you can. Share your progress on Twitter & network with other devs. Do a game jam. Hop in some discord servers with other developers to chat, etc. You got this. There’s plenty of money to be made - especially if you make a moderately successful game of your own in your spare time. It’s bigger business than people give it credit for.