Category: Beat Saber

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‘Beat Saber’ & ‘Job Simulator’ Are PSVR’s Most Downloaded Games of The Year… Again

It’s that time again, when PlayStation reveals the top downloads for the past year. And it comes as no surprise that long-reigning platform champs Beat Saber (2018) and Job Simulator (2016) have again clinched the top two spots as the most-downloaded games for PSVR in 2021.

PlayStation released the list today, which shows off PS4, PS5 and PSVR downloads for the whole of 2021. split across North America and Europe.

Note: the list below represents paid downloads only, and doesn’t account for physical disc sales, DLC, or free games.

PSVR Top Downloads – 2021

US/Canada EU
1 Beat Saber Beat Saber
2 Job Simulator Job Simulator
3 SUPERHOT VR SUPERHOT VR
4 GORN Creed: Rise to Glory
5 Swordsman VR Swordsman VR
6 Creed Rise to Glory The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
7 Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series GORN
8 The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners RICK AND MORTY: VIRTUAL RICK-ALITY
9 RICK AND MORTY: VIRTUAL RICK-ALITY Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series
10 The Walking Dead Onslaught ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission

–
As you can see, there’s a bunch of overlap across both EU and NA rankings, with ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission and The Walking Dead Onslaught making it into the top 10 of those respective regions. The latest list also looks shockingly close to last years. Without more detailed data to go on though, it’s difficult to tell exactly what it means.

A bit of speculation: much of the top 10 is essentially populated with the standard array of ‘must-have’ titles, and it’s been that way for a few years now. This may betray the relative stagnation of the PSVR platform, and could point towards good user attraction, but poor user retention. Not a single title in either section was released in 2021. On top of that, most PSVR hardware bundles have been difficult to find in shops or online, so it stands to reason that a small number of newcomers trailing in throughout the year have driven content sales.

Whatever the case, PlayStation is getting ready to release its next-gen PSVR 2 headset for PS5—possibly near the end of this year—which looks usher in a new age of console VR gaming for the company.

The upcoming headset’s specs are a massive leap in comparison to the first-gen PSVR, which was released in 2016. The newly dubbed PSVR 2 is packing inside-out tracking, eye-tracking tech, significantly higher resolution and honest-to-goodness VR controllers—which means much of PSVR’s game catalogue may not be backwards compatible. This might otherwise explain the lack of investment in high-quality exclusives over the past year.

On that front, Sony is already planning at least one big title: a made-for-VR game set in the Horizon universe. And if it’s set to be a launch title, it’s well positioned to take advantage of all the cool tech Sony is packing into PSVR 2.

The post ‘Beat Saber’ & ‘Job Simulator’ Are PSVR’s Most Downloaded Games of The Year… Again appeared first on Road to VR.

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Quest Day Gave Away This Awesome Beat Saber Christmas Sweater, But Most Of Us Can’t Have It

A lucky few will have got their hands on an awesome Beat Saber Christmas Sweater during Meta’s Quest Day event earlier on, but most of us will have missed out.

Hosted over the course of a few hours, Quest Day was essentially a viral marketing campaign for the Meta Quest platform. A fictional engineer named Dr. 6DOF showcased ridiculous, equally-fictional Quest peripherals every half an hour, with a limited giveaway launching for themed merchandise inspired by said inventions at the same time.

So, for example, Dr. 6DOF teased a ‘connected oven’ called a ‘Quest-O-Wave’, but ended up giving away a cookie-cutter kit with Quest-themed shapes. Or a ‘Quest Treat Flinger’ fired plastic balls to grab a pet’s attention whilst Meta gave away a real ‘Pet Distractor Mat’.

One showcase, meanwhile was for a set of Beat Saber string lights that would blink to the beat of the game itself (which actually does sound pretty great). The giveaway, meanwhile, was for a Beat Saber-themed Christmas sweater, which you can see below.

Quest Day Beat Saber Christmas Sweater

Pretty cool, right? And I bet a lot of fans out there would happily throw their hat into the ring to win one, or even buy one were it to appear in an online store.

But, as with the rest of the Quest Day giveaways, all of the available sweaters were snapped up pretty much instantly. Every tweet promoting a giveaway features a series of replies from fans that weren’t able to get their own, noting that stock appeared to last mere seconds. Not to mention that giveaways were only made available to residents in the US, and not other territories.

We asked Meta if these items might find their way back to availability, to which the company said it would listen to feedback as it decided if there would be another Quest Day event in the future. For now, though, it seems like these items are destined for a lucky few only.

Did you manage to snag anything from Quest Day? Let us know in the comments below.

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Beat Saber Lady Gaga Music Pack DLC: Hands-On & Impressions

The Lady Gaga music pack is now available for Beat Saber, but is this release on the Edge of Glory or is it more of a Bad Romance? Here are our impressions.

When the Interscope Mixtape DLC was announced for Beat Saber, we hoped that it maybe signaled the beginning of a larger or ongoing deal to bring more of the label’s artists to Beat Saber. A few months later and approaching the end of the year, we can now say things played out pretty much as we had hoped — not only did Interscope and Beat Games release the Billie Eilish pack in September, but they’ve teamed up again to finish the year with a Lady Gaga music pack as well.

These two artists are a step up in popularity for Beat Saber — Eilish is one of the biggest pop stars right now, and Gaga has remained a huge force of nature in the music industry since her late 2000s debut. We were pretty impressed with the Billie Eilish pack and we’re happy to say that, by and large, the Gaga pack delivers as well.

The song selection is both generous and encompassing, hopefully pleasing long-time Gaga fans and the casual crowd alike. It helps that Gaga has such a selection of hits — when there’s so many certified bangers on offer, it’s hard to go wrong.

The majority of the tracklist features hits from Gaga’s debut album The Fame and its subsequent expanded reissue The Fame Monster. There’s also a few tracks from 2009’s Born This Way and the more recent 2020 release Chromatica. The new Gaga-themed environment is based on the latter album and looks absolutely fantastic.

But how do the new tracks play? For the most part, really well. I played on Expert and found that tracks to be fun, engaging and possessing a bouncy energy that feels reflective of Gaga’s style. The beat map design in this pack lands in the sweet spot that, for me, encapsulates good Beat Saber track design — not so hard that you have to replay tracks over and over just to understand and finish them, but not so easy that you can finish them on the first try and have zero areas to improve or practice.

There are, as usual, a few exceptions — Bad Romance seems noticeably easier on Expert, for example — but overall the tracks are solid and engaging, with Just Dance, Poker Face and Stupid Love coming away as my personal favorites. While the pack might be a tad easier in difficulty overall compared to its Eilish predecessor, on their own merits I found the Gaga tracks to be fun, unique and challenging in equal measure.

Difficulty aside, it’s really the creativity of these DLC packs, particularly their mapping, that is starting to become a selling point. The DLC packs seems to capture the spirit of the artists in their mapping increasingly well with each new release. The fun zany quirks of these beat maps evoke the exact right feeling and spirit for a Lady Gaga-themed release. Likewise, the rigid yet playful mapping of the Eilish beat maps felt well-curated for her tracks as well.

These little, almost-indescribable je-ne-sais-quoi elements that are sprinkled throughout the maps really sell the tracks as unique and thought-out experiences, tailored to the music and feel of the artist. This has improved with each release and it’s becoming a defining and differentiating factor of Beat Saber’s DLC.

As more Beat Saber music packs release, the disparity in difficulty between them is taking a back seat and becoming less important. While it would be nice to have more consistency across the board, it’s also commendable that Beat Games is are able to make each of these packs feel distinguished from one another and interesting in their own way.

Beat Saber is on the precipice of having so many DLC packs to choose from that the difficulty scale between them won’t matter. What will matter is that your preferred pack is fun to play and feels somewhat representative of the artist in question. In this way, both the Gaga pack and the Eilish pack are recent home runs, and I can’t wait to see who is next on the roster.

The Lady Gaga music pack is available now for Beat Saber on all platforms, with tracks sold individually or available as a bundle.

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More Hit Songs Come to ‘Beat Saber’ with Surprise Launch of Lady Gaga Music Pack

Continuing a trend of tapping music from some of the world’s most popular artists, Beat Saber today sees the surprise launch of a new Lady Gaga music pack which adds 10 of the pop-star’s songs to the game.

Following DLC music packs from the likes of Skrillex and Billie Eilish, today VR’s hit rhythm game Beat Saber sees the release of a new music pack from Lady Gaga.

Priced at $10 for the complete package, or $2 per song, the music pack brings 10 new tracks to the game, including some of the artist’s most popular tunes. Here’s the full track-list:

  • Alejandro
  • Bad Romance
  • Born This Way
  • Just Dance (feat. Colby O’Donis)
  • Paparazzi
  • Poker Face
  • Rain On Me (with Ariana Grande)
  • Stupid Love
  • Telephone (feat. Beyoncé)
  • The Edge of Glory

The Lady Gaga Beat Saber music pack will become available at some point this evening (though exact timing is unclear). It’s confirmed to be coming to all versions of the game, which include Quest, Oculus PC, Steam, and PSVR.

Image courtesy Beat Games

The announcement happened during The Game Awards event this evening; Meta (which owns the studio behind Beat Saber) pulled a similar move back in 2019 when the company surprise-launched the Green Day music pack during the same event.

The new pack brings the total number of official tracks available in the game to 136, with 37 being part of the base game while 89 are available as paid DLC.

A glimpse of the new environment for the Lady Gaga ‘Beat Saber’ music pack | Image courtesy Beat Games

Beat Saber also has a vibrant modding community which also makes countless unofficial tracks (AKA ‘custom songs’) available to the game. Players may have already played some of the tracks from the new Lady Gaga DLC, though the DLC tracks include official beat maps for all difficulties and usually reach a high quality bar (which isn’t always the case among Beat Saber custom songs). The official music pack also includes new environments and effects which act as a backdrop for the new songs.

The post More Hit Songs Come to ‘Beat Saber’ with Surprise Launch of Lady Gaga Music Pack appeared first on Road to VR.

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Beat Saber Announces Lady Gaga Music Pack, Launching Tonight

Beat Saber announced its next music pack tonight at the 2021 Game Awards — the Lady Gaga Music Pack features 10 tracks and will be available tonight at 8pm PT.

In a similar fashion to the surprise Green Day music pack announce and release at the 2019 Game Awards, Meta and Beat Games dropped a surprise Lady Gaga Music Pack announcement during tonight’s broadcast of the awards show.

The music pack will release tonight and features 10 tracks primarily from Gaga’s 2008 debut The Fame (and its 2009 reissue The Fame Monster), with a smattering of tracks from both her 2009 sophomore album Born This Way and 2020 sixth solo album Chromatica.

Here is the full tracklist:

– Alejandro

– Bad Romance

– Born This Way

– Just Dance (feat. Colby O’Donis)

– Paparazzi

– Poker Face

– Rain on Me (with Ariana Grande)

– Stupid Love

– Telephone (feat. Beyoncé)

– The Edge of Glory

As is usually the case with new Beat Saber releases, the Lady Gaga Music Pack comes with a new environment, inspired by the aesthetic of her 2020 album Chromatica, pictured below.

Lady gaga beat saber

The Lady Gaga pack follows on from the Billie Eilish pack, which released in September — we thought it was a solid lineup of tracks and a great addition to the Beat Saber catalog. We haven’t had enough time to weigh in on Gaga’s tracks just yet, but keep your eyes peeled.

There should be even more content on the horizon for Beat Saber players too — at Connect 2021, Beat Games teased new cosmetic sabers and some form of progression system coming soon.

The Lady Gaga music pack will be available for Beat Saber tonight at 8pm PT on all platforms.

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Beat Saber Can Be Shared Between Accounts On The Same Meta Quest

Households with a single Meta Quest logged into multiple accounts can now share a single copy of Beat Saber.

Earlier this year, before switching over to the Meta branding, Facebook rolled out multi-user support on its Quest platform as an experimental feature. With version 35 this week Meta is embracing it as a full-fledged feature on Quest alongside app sharing, mixed reality capture and in the weeks ahead the ability to take a call in Messenger. Beat Saber developer Beat Games is one of several VR-focused game studios Facebook developed over the last few years, but Beat Saber is likely in a class by itself in terms of revenue for a VR game. The rhythm-slicing game runs on Steam, PlayStation VR, and Quest, but it was said to have seen $100 million in revenue on Quest alone. Multiplayer just launched for Beat Saber on PSVR quite recently, but that update didn’t offer cross-play between the platforms even though Oculus and Steam players have been able to play against one another since September.

When it comes to Quest, the feature “App Sharing” feature from Meta is said to include the Original Soundtracks, Extras, and Camelia Pack. So that means if you’ve purchased the game with an account and have it set as the administrator of a headset, other people should be able to log into their own Facebook accounts on the headset and play the game with those songs. We’ll be curious if Beat Saber’s DLC, which includes some big name artists, will ever get support for the feature.

We’ve found that some other games have supported App Sharing as well but we haven’t compiled a list yet — let us know in the comments below if you’ve tested this feature successfully with Beat Saber or another Quest app.

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Beat Saber Teases New Content With Cosmetic Sabers

During Meta’s (formerly Facebook) annual Connect conference, Beat Games debuted a small teaser that showed a new type of cosmetic saber.

The stinger video, embedded below, came midway through the keynote presentation, just after it was announced that Beat Saber has now passed the $100 million mark for revenue on the Quest platform alone.

It’s not exactly clear what this new content is, but it looks like it could be a fairly substantial addition to the game. Most content updates for Beat Saber have been purely new music drops or paid DLC music pack releases. However, this looks to be something different.

The most striking thing in the short teaser is the saber, which looks markedly different from the standard sabers available in the game. Custom sabers have long been an element of the Beat Saber custom modding scene on several platforms, but it looks like Quest might get access to some form of official cosmetic sabers in the near future.

The ‘Level Up’ graphic also might be hinting at some kind of progression system. If we had to guess, it might be something like a Fornite/Population: One Battle Pass system with competitive seasons. That could mean opening the door to cosmetic rewards, like the fancy saber in the stinger video.

Just before they ran the teaser footage, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oculus Studios Producer Deborah Guzman discussed the importance of live-service games that “launch updates and new downloadable content regularly” to the constantly-evolving metaverse. Beat Saber was given as an example of such a title, so it’s not far-fetched to think that some kind of progression system or unlockable cosmetic items might be on the way soon.

What do you think Beat Saber is teasing? Let us know in the comments.

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Free Beat Saber Halloween Track Goes Live

It’s a busy day for the Beat Saber crowd. A little earlier, the PSVR version got full multiplayer support, and now all versions of the game have got a free new track too.

The free Beat Saber Halloween track arrives just in time and is called Spooky Beat. It was created by developer Beat Games’ music head and former CEO, Jaroslav Beck. You can listen to it right here or get a preview below.

As the name suggests, Spooky Beat has some chilling tones to it, but it definitely calls back to the original tracks that Beck and co made for the game in its early days. You can easily see this being a tough new track for the game’s most devoted fans to master. The track will be live across Quest, PSVR and PC VR versions of the game, so keep an eye out.

It’s been a while since Beat Saber has seen a free content update, with recent new tracks from artists like Billie Eilish and Skrillex adding to the VR game’s ever-growing library of premium content. Beat Games did, however, recently add crossplay between the Oculus and Steam versions of the game.

Oh, and this is Content ID free, meaning you’ll be able to stream the track live with no hassle.

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Beat Saber Finally Releases Multiplayer Support for PlayStation VR

Beat Saber

It seems like a long time in the making (and it is) but Beat Games has just surprised launched Beat Saber‘s multiplayer component for PlayStation VR.

Yes, that’s correct, PlayStation VR owners can now enjoy playing against their friends in the wildly popular rhythm action videogame. Naturally, there are a couple of caveats of course, namely, you need to have a PlayStation Plus subscription and you can only play against the PlayStation VR players, cross-play isn’t supported.

Even so, after all the delays it’s still great to hear one of Beat Saber’s biggest features can now be enjoyed on PlayStation VR. Multiplayer has been available for Oculus Quest and PC VR headsets for the past year with support for PlayStation VR initially slated for the beginning of 2021. Beat Games has been honest in their issues with expanding support to the headset, taking much longer than the team expected.

When it comes to cross-play, that shouldn’t be too much of an issue for PlayStation VR owners, Beat Saber has consistently been the most downloaded videogame on the platform as PlayStation Store download charts have highlighted. That doesn’t mean to say cross-play will never come to PlayStation VR. The feature only arrived for Oculus Quest and PC VR players last month, with the studio previously saying: “We’re also exploring ways to allow crossplay for the PS VR.”

Beat Saber PSVR multiplayer

As an added bonus for all Beat Saber owners, the studio has dropped Spooky Beat a free track by Jaroslav Black, Beat Games’ in-house audio wizard behind many of the early core tracks.

Beat Saber players have been treated to a nice stream of new content over the last couple of months, most notably all of those new Skrillex songs in August and ten Billy Eilish tunes last month. As further updates arrive for the videogame, VRFocus will keep you updated.

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Beat Saber PSVR Multiplayer Finally Live After A Year Of Delays

After a year of delays, Beat Saber PSVR multiplayer support is finally live.

Beat Games announced the launch of the feature on Twitter today. Multiplayer arrives as a free update, though you’ll need a PlayStation Plus subscription to experience it. This version also doesn’t support cross-play with the Oculus Quest and PC VR versions of the game.

This has been a long-time coming to say the least. Other versions of Beat Saber got multiplayer support, in which up to five players compete head-to-head, back in October 2020. But the PSVR version was delayed to an unknown date, the window for which kept stretching out further into 2021. We had begun to wonder if this version of the game really would get multiplayer support.

Not that that stopped people buying the PSVR version of Beat Saber – it’s now been at the top of both the EU and US PlayStation Store charts every month for an entire year. Last month the game got its latest DLC starring Billie Eilish, though there’s sure to be more content in store for the smash-hit VR game.

It’s great to see Beat Saber PSVR multiplayer support going live. Now we’re just wondering if we’ll see a new version of the game for Sony’s upcoming PS5 VR headset given that Facebook now owns Beat Games itself.