We knew Superhot VR (2017) was doing extremely well when Superhot Team announced the VR adaptation had generated more revenue than the original PC game back in April. Now the studio has set one of the most impressive benchmarks of success for the medium, as over the past week Superhot VR garnered a cool $2 million in gross revenue across all VR platforms.
Callum Underwood, an industry consultant and talent scout, announced the news on the studio’s behalf:
SUPERHOT VR has grossed over 2 million dollars on all platforms in the past 7 days alone. Thank you players!! pic.twitter.com/jkTINcGH4f
Underwood also notes that numbers on the PlayStation platform aren’t precise, as Sony will furnish the exact sales numbers next year.
He couldn’t specify the breakdown of which platform made the most money for the studio (supported headsets include Oculus Quest, PSVR, and SteamVR headsets), although Superhot VR is a pretty reliable watermark of success of the VR medium in whole.
For comparison’s sake, the breakout hit parody sim Job Simulator (2016) passed the thee million dollar mark after around eight months after launching on Steam. It also rolled out slowly to other stores, including a day-one launch on PSVR in October 2016 and on the Oculus Store in December of that year for Oculus Touch’s launch—the absolute ideal launch plan for any VR game at the time when consumer VR first took off.
We have no way of knowing the specifics surrounding Superhot VR’s success, but it’s at very least clear that a bunch of new headsets have been bought as gifts this holiday season. Oculus Quest, the $400 standalone headset launched by Facebook earlier this year, has been out of stock all over the Internet this holiday season.
Intuition points to Quest making the biggest effect on Superhot VR’s sales numbers. The headset, although capable of playing PC VR games via Oculus Link, has a comparatively smaller native library of games than Oculus, Steam and the PlayStation Store, which might have created a bottleneck for new users looking for their first game.
And it’s a pretty excellent choice too; it’s both a highly-rated game by users, and also one of the few with brand name cachet for non-VR gamers too, as the original version saw viral success when it released on PCs back in 2016.
One of VR’s most popular games — Superhot VR — grossed more than $2 million across all platforms in the week around Christmas.
The popular VR title has been available on Oculus Rift since late 2016 and released on Oculus Quest when the new standalone headset launched in May 2019. Taking full advantage of the completely wireless all-in-one system, we called the Quest version “the best version of a genuine classic” and it tops our list of the 25 best Oculus Quest games. Notably, Superhot VR was one of the few titles which did not support cross-buy with Oculus Rift meaning if a Rift owner bought a Quest and wanted the game again they needed to purchase it separately.
Superhot VR is a game in which time moves and enemies come toward you only when your body moves. It is also available on Steam for other PC VR headsets and on PlayStation VR as well. There’s also a different non-VR game with the same name available for traditional gaming platforms.
SUPERHOT VR has grossed over 2 million dollars on all platforms in the past 7 days alone. Thank you players!! 🎂🥳 pic.twitter.com/jkTINcGH4f
— Callum rawr x3 nuzzles, pounces on you, uwu (@DevRelCallum) December 29, 2019
The $2 million figure, grossed over the week around Christmas, refers exclusively to the sales performance of the VR version — Superhot VR — across all platforms. I reached out to Callum Underwood, Director of Special Projects for Superhot, and asked him if he had any detail he could provide beyond the tweet.
Underwood sent the following:
“We’re releasing these sales numbers not to brag, but to provide insight into what a successful game can bring in VR. We tend not to involve ourselves in ‘VR is dead’ or ‘year of VR?’ conversations, as we mostly just enjoy making games… and then working on making those games make money! Thanks to all the new, existing, and returning players.. we hope your holiday period is as good as ours! I can point to holiday sales of hardware, smart discounts we applied on various platforms based on IndieBI data, and the fact that we’re consistently listed in ‘top games’… but I also have to point to the designers and developers of SUPERHOT VR for making our (the biz team) job easy. The success of SUPERHOT VR is due to them.”
Underwood added that Superhot’s IndieBI tool helps track historical sales data and helped inform decisions like what kind of discounts to offer and on which platforms to offer them. For example, Superhot VR is sold at full price, $25, on Quest at the time of this writing but discounted to $17 on Steam. The game also deployed other discounts and bundles during the holiday season. IndieBI is in a testing phase right now and not available generally yet, but developers can request a beta invite.
My first words to Cloudhead CEO Denny Unger after playing an early version of Pistol Whip: “Holy $&#%”. After dozens of hours in the game that still sums up my overall impression.
A standard Pistol Whip play session for me is at least half an hour with my knees bent for agility and moving closer to the beat each time through a song. I’ll feel an adrenaline rush gaining proficiency and matching the tempo of my shots only to be killed by a bullet I know is coming. I’ll grit my teeth in frustration at my own stupid head for not moving out of the way quicker, and go again and again — typically until l beat the level or wipe away the sweat and take a breather.
You can look at Pistol Whip and see so many other VR titles influencing it. Even if Pistol Whip wears the rhythm of Beat Saber and art style of Superhot on its stylish sleeves, Cloudhead’s new game moves VR design forward in its own ways. Rather than slashing cubes or simply avoiding bullets in slow-motion, every song (or scene) in Pistol Whip moves you through the level at a steady pace. Enemies pop out at pre-determined locations that you then must shoot or punch to the beat of the music to get the highest score possible.
Difficulty Options
I count around half a dozen difficulty-altering options Pistol Whip players can try to find their groove. There are separate scoreboards for Oculus and Steam players and, though many people probably won’t play this way, if you get hooked on maximizing score there’s enough challenge and skill required in Deadeye mode for potentially endless play.
More scenes (both free and paid) are planned by developer Cloudhead Games, with the 10 included available in easy, normal and hard flavors. The main mode of Pistol Whip is built around an aim assistance feature that makes most players feel like an expert shooter. Most people are not a John Wick-level marksman and the built-in modifiers will prove it — just turn Deadeye on with the built-in menu and feel the crushing difficulty of perfectly lining up sights and timing shots just right.
If this is too hard, players can activate the Dual-wield mode to add a second gun and riddle the colorful simulation with bullets.
Pistol Whip Skill Progression
Each Pistol Whip song included at launch is licensed from Kannibalen Records and roughly three to five minutes long. You can pick any of the ten at the start of the game, and any difficulty. One shot takes out enemies with no armor, a bulletproof vest takes one more, or a motorcycle helmet combined with full body armor requires four shots total to defeat.
I’d expect many players who are familiar with VR, and shooters, to try the normal difficulty at first and find their way through some tracks after maybe a few attempts. Some players — those unfamiliar with games and VR in general, or those looking for a more relaxed session — can use the training and start with the easy version of the scenes.
Select the hard version of a scene and the number of enemies increases as does the number of bullets needed to take many of them down. Some of the songs at this difficulty could take some players dozens of tries to get through. David Jagneaux played five of the songs over more than an hour on stream and he didn’t complete one on hard. In his defense, he spent that time touring through some of the game’s built-in modifiers, answering questions from viewers, and generally not building the memory of a track which is critical to completing one. I’ve beaten all the scenes on hard — I spent many hours doing so — and moved onto Deadeye mode to try and improve my aim.
This is the only song I’ve beaten so far in that mode:
The important bit here is that there are multiple levels of challenge for each of the included scenes, and multiple styles of play it can serve. This should allow a wide range of players — from a shooter-savvy marksman to a first-time VR buyer — to find entry points where they can start searching for Pistol Whip’s groove.
Dancing Through A Gunfight
There are so many power fantasy action movies that come to mind moving forward through Pistol Whip’s glowing fever dream maps. The one which I think best describes the nirvana power fantasy feeling of playing it is Edge Of Tomorrow. That’s the Tom Cruise versus aliens movie where he gets a power that lets him — Live. Die. Repeat. — essentially fighting seemingly unwinnable battles over and over again and marginally improving over time.
Pistol Whip teaches you to read the environment looking for platforms where enemies may spawn moments before they actually do, to listen close to the gunfire and know exactly when, and from which direction, the bullets are coming. This training, hard-earned from repeated playthroughs, teaches players when to duck, lean or move out of the way just in time to save themselves. Proficiency at Pistol Whip means moving with the rhythm and that’s just about the time it starts looking and feeling more like dancing.
Below is a video for the same scene and difficulty level as above but this time I turn Deadeye mode off and, because I’ve memorized the map, I play in a much more relaxed style where aim isn’t as important.
Does it get boring?
If you’re not a fan of Pistol Whip’s included music there’s no support for custom maps at launch, so don’t expect to play a level inspired by 8 Mile’s Lose Yourself, or whatever your dream song is, for some time.
I find most of the songs pretty enjoyable but definitely take a listen to the videos on this page and see if there’s a fit with your tastes before committing to a purchase. I find the songs that aren’t my favorites can still be fun because the level designs come with enough surprises to make them challenging in slightly different ways.
On Revelations you’ve got to regularly slip your head between narrow crevices while on Download The Future some of the enemies send bullets from far away long before you can reply. That means you’ve got several more seconds to get out of the way of a wave of bullets while more enemies ready up to fire closer to you.
Death is my favorite of the launch scenes with its more than 5-minute battle playing out like you’re being chased through a Day of The Dead festival colored by yellows, oranges and reds on a hot day, then, after about a minute, the lyric “I’ll bring you death!” marks the transition to a cool kind of afterlife marked with purples and pinks as the walkway changes to a long narrow path over the abyss.
Mileage with Pistol Whip will definitely vary from mine, which amounts to roughly 50 hours with no end in sight. The main motivation here is dodge the bullet or die. If you complete all 10 songs on hard quickly, don’t like a few of the songs enough not to play their scene, or don’t find the Deadeye and/or Dual-wield modes to be a fun challenge, you’re going to spend a fraction of the time with this game compared to me.
Comfort
Pistol Whip artificially moves the player forward through its scenes in a straight line at a constant rate of speed. While nowhere near the most uncomfortable type of simulated movement VR software might employ, it is possible some players might feel a little woozy or uncomfortable. VR’s current rhythm leader Beat Saber, in contrast, moves boxes past a stationary player that should be more comfortable to a wider selection of players. Still, I am one of the most sensitive people on staff to simulator sickness and experienced not even a hint of it in Pistol Whip with a Valve Index or Oculus Quest.
Even if you get a couple hours of fun out of Pistol Whip that’s — let’s be honest — more than most VR games get out of most players, and practically none of that time wearing the headset is spent learning made-for-VR mechanics like teleportation or grasping simulated objects. No, in Pistol Whip you point the gun, pull the trigger, shake it up and down to reload and remember to dodge incoming bullets by moving your head out of the way. That’s it. That’s the entire game and, for me, each of these scenes and the Deadeye modifier makes for an addictive challenge that pays off again and again and again.
Pistol Whip Platform Differences
The wireless freedom of Quest can make it easier to move with the kind of speed and confidence required, to, say, jump into the air to dodge a bullet and then bring your gun down on a bad guy’s head in a single movement. On Index it’s a gorgeous trip with a smoothness to everything — and a depth to the sound — that’s missed in the Oculus Quest. As noted above there are separate leaderboards for Oculus and Steam buyers.
Violence
Despite the age warnings associated with many headsets kids often play VR games and there are some differences between Pistol Whip and Beat Saber which parents or guardians should bear in mind. Beat Saber hands players a simulated tool inspired by a fictional laser sword from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and its “enemies” are boxes. Pistol Whip’s tool is a gun and its enemies take the shape of people. So I would recommend taking to heart a lyric in one of Pistol Whip’s songs: “Due to some violent content, parental discretion is advised.”
Pistol Whip Review Verdict:
Pistol Whip’s multiple difficulties and modifiers like Deadeye and Dual-wield add depth to a game that’s more addictive and satisfying than Beat Saber. This is neither fully a shooter nor completely a rhythm game yet it ticks off both boxes and does so exceptionally quickly in a stylish package. The 10 launch songs, all in the same general musical style, are a bit limiting. Pistol Whip, though, is already the game that brings me back to my VR headset again and again, and I expect that to be the case for months to come. I’ll be in the group waiting for more official scenes to arrive, trying to finish a few more songs in Deadeye mode on hard, showing the game to others and hoping someone figures out how to add custom maps and songs.
Designers at Canada-based Cloudhead waste no time in their latest game. Pistol Whip basically points a gun at your head and says “dodge this.” You better move, or you’re going down like just another agent in The Matrix.
The VR game debuts Nov. 7 across most major headsets including Quest, Index, Rift and Vive (with a PSVR version in the works), and the software wears its inspirations on stylish sleeves. If you’ve played Superhot, you can see that game the moment you hear the words “Pistol…Whip” at scene selection. Beat Saber’s influence is obvious, too, but so are the fantasies of generations who grew up watching action movies like James Bond, Die Hard, Kingsman and John Wick.
That’s the level upon which Pistol Whip’s foundation is laid firmest. It is a VR game made for people who like movies where heroes get things done with a gun. Put another way, it should appeal to almost anyone who thinks Keanu Reeves looks good in a suit.
Symphony Of Bullets
I’ve spent nearly 40 hours with early versions of Pistol Whip on Valve Index and I see no end in sight to my time with the game. As I type this, my hand aches from gripping the controller too tightly, and for too long, replaying a single hard level in “Deadeye” mode.
The game launches with 10 levels, or “scenes” as Cloudhead calls them. Each scene — a catchy song licensed from Kannibalen Records — is mapped to a continuous three-to-five minute path through colorful glowing stages. Each scene amounts to a dreamy re-imagining of chase or gun-battle scenes from action movies. There are easy, medium and hard difficulties for each scene and they are all built around an auto-aim system tuned to help a wide selection of players slip into this power fantasy.
Auto-aim
The auto-aim ensures everyone playing Pistol Whip is a highly skilled marksman relentlessly pulled forward through each level. Enemies sprint into place and align themselves at a series of predefined moments along the path. When they fire you’ve got some time to move your head out of the way. There are really only three main enemy types and they differ visually just enough to tell you they need one, two or four bullets to go down. There are, of course, more of the harder to break baddies on higher difficulties.
I put most of my time with the game into this auto-aim mode. Players are likely to find different play styles depending what you want to do. Going for a high score? Maybe start moving to the beat to help you place your bullets at the right moment. I found a satisfying flow state playing this way — a kind of dance with my heart thumping in my chest and shots colliding perfectly in sync with the music. I haven’t felt anything like it since, maybe, Mirror’s Edge.
Deadeye Modifier
I recently turned on the “Deadeye” modifier and, spoiler alert, turning auto-aim off is like that arc in a comic book hero’s journey where they lose their powers. I can’t yet beat a level on hard difficulty in this mode and I haven’t found that relaxing/exhilarating flow state I did in the main game. Honing my aim, though, also feels like an incredible challenge to undertake as well and one that’s likely to draw me back again and again. It also offers a 20% score bonus.
Pistol Whip Scoring
With auto-aim I’d memorized the spawn beats of enemies to such a degree, and became so aligned with the assistance, that I’d learned to take my shots fast and move my head so little that it didn’t take much energy anymore to dodge the occasional bullet and stay in command of a hard level. There are 200 points possible per shot summed from a combination of accuracy and on-beat shooting. “Deadeye” mode, then, is there for players who want “training accuracy or as a high-level challenge,” according to Cloudhead.
What About Custom Songs?
Some VR players may turn Deadeye on way quicker than I did — it wasn’t in earlier builds I tried — and I’m far from what anyone would call “good” at shooter games. So many players will probably exhaust the game’s levels way faster than me. Cloudhead’s official comment on “custom” music is that “because Pistol Whip levels are complete scenes rather than ‘voids’ like in traditional rhythm games, custom tracks are a more complicated process. However, we have solutions in mind that we are excited to address after launch.”
The studio is also planning “more free and paid songs/scenes for after launch.”
Hype Train Pulling Into The Station
Game reviews are embargoed by Cloudhead until release of the game at 10 am Pacific on Nov. 7. In all my time with the game I’ve only played five of the 10 completed songs. We should have our hands on a finished build of the game with plenty of time to develop a full review, but for now Cloudhead’s lifted the embargo on initial impressions.
So, here it is then. Pistol Whip’s consumed me for much of 2019. Cloudhead announced the game as part of our E3VR showcase this summer and when I went on vacation I took the Valve Index and its base stations with me because I expected Cloudhead to send me a build during the trip. They did, and my family is still mad at me for playing it in the other room so much instead of visiting with them. I was so impressed by what I played I got a passport and booked the multi-flight journey out to visit their office in Canada and interview the development team face-to-face so I could understand their journey toward this game.
For roughly seven years now I’ve obsessed over the promises of VR technology and I’ve been a fair bit skeptical the entire time. I wish VR would allow more people to work from home while empowering more folks to spend meaningful time with their families. Maybe that’s the future of VR — I hope it is — but the fun I’ve found in Pistol Whip tells me something Cloudhead seemed to realize in its journey from two Myst-like VR games and Aperture Hand Labs to this one.
First, we’ll need guns. Lots of guns.
You can wish list Pistol Whip at the following links:
Pistol Whip is coming to PC VR and Oculus Quest on November 7 with a PSVR version “coming soon” as well.
The new John Wick-inspired Cloudhead Games title is described as an “action-rhythm FPS” which appears inspired by the art style of Superhot and the global rhythm phenomenon of Beat Saber. While Beat Saber gives you swords, Pistol Whip gives you a gun and its design makes you feel like you’re in an action sequence from a movie.
“There’s all these great action movies. How do we pull a user in a relentless, unstoppable way through an action sequence in a movie,” said Cloudhead CEO Denny Unger. “What people want is the power fantasy of having a gun and feeling like they are a badass action movie hero, but they don’t necessarily have the skills to be a John Wick or somebody like that. People don’t inherently have that accuracy, and the coordination necessarily to do all these crazy things with their weapon, so we just kept pulling back on what the user needed to come out of an experience feeling satisfied and feeling like it fulfilled that fantasy for them.”
The Oculus version of the game includes cross-buy so a single purchase from Facebook’s Oculus should work for both Rift and Quest. You can wishlist the game now on Steam, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest and Viveport. It launches with 10 songs from Kannibalen Records with plans for regular music and level updates.
Cloudhead is known for its early hand-controlled room-scale VR game The Gallery and its sequel as well as the introductory experience it released earlier this year for Valve’s Index Controllers — Aperture Hand Lab.
Here’s the latest trailer for the game along with a brief exclusive interview with the creators:
Cloudhead describes it as “inspired by God-mode action movies like John Wick and Equilibrium, Pistol Whip throws you gun-first into an explosive batch of hand-crafted action sequences each set to their own breakneck soundtrack.” In Pistol Whip you’re pulled down a long corridor with enemies spawning all around you. You’ll need to dodge the incoming bullets and you can either shoot the targets or punch them with your gun if they get in your way.
I’ve put dozens of hours into early versions of Pistol Whip but I’ve agreed not to share gameplay impressions until we’ve played a more complete version of the game. We’ll have those impressions and gameplay footage for you in the coming weeks so check back soon for details.
“There’s a subset of people who we still need to get into VR,” said Designer Antony Stevens. “We still need to get people coming back into VR and Beat Saber is a great example of doing that. It’s great for first time players, its great for return players. It’s a solid product. But I mean — it’s not everyone — and maybe we hit the other side of the coin with Pistol Whip.”
It’s that time of year again; Oculus Connect 6 is almost upon us.
This year finds Oculus in an interesting place, having recently launched not one but two VR headsets in Rift S and Quest. With hardware hype out of the way, it’s time to get down to the business of making better software for it. That’s what a lot of this year’s sessions are about.
Facebook says the keynotes will be aired live on its Oculus page as well as in VR via Bigscreen and Venues. Facebook typically releases the videos of individual sessions later on YouTube. So, whether you’re attending in person or catching up online, here are six sessions to look out for. You can see the full list here. All times listed are Pacific.
The Keynotes
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM, September 25 + 26
There are two keynotes at this year’s Connect, one on the morning of the 25th and one on the morning of 26th. As per usual, the first day’s speech will be the one to really look out for. You can expect a raft of updates on all things Oculus. On the second day, Oculus technical guide John Carmack will be expected to give a typically exhaustive speech that’s never one to miss.
From Lightspeed to Lightsabers: The Making of Vader Immortal
Breakout 220B | 12:30 PM – 01:15 PM, September 25
Vader Immortal remains one of the most polished and all-round best experiences of the year. In this session, developer ILMxLAB will join publisher Oculus Studios in discussing how it hit such a high bar. Expect tips and tricks on storytelling, visuals and combat as well as a look at how Quest shaped development. Of course, Vader Immortal Episode II is on the way for the end of the year, so hopefully we’ll find out more on that during OC6 too.
Always a staple event in the Oculus Connect schedule; John Carmack will sit down with developers and walk through their app submissions, offering painfully to-the-point criticism and tips and tricks. This is the first App Review since the launch of Quest, so this year’s edition should be especially interesting.
Facebook’s Future in Social VR
Breakout 220B | 12:30 PM – 01:15 PM. September 26
Now this should be an interesting one. Facebook, a social networking company, is arguably tailing in the social VR scene right now. Spaces has been all but forgotten and its overall social strategy in VR has been unclear, to say the least. Learning about its future plans for this area on Quest, Rift and beyond will make this one of the most important sessions of Oculus Connect 6.
Using Vulkan for Mobile VR
Tech Talk – Demo Hall | 12:30 PM – 01:15 PM, September 26
With the introduction of Oculus Quest, getting the most out of mobile VR has become more important than ever. This session, led by Facebook software engineers, will take developers over the best practices using the Vulkan API. If you’re looking to be best on Quest, this is an important session for sure.
SUPERHOT VR on Quest: From 100W to 4W in 12 Months
Breakout 220B | 02:30 PM – 03:15 PM, September 26
A rare showing from the Superhot team will see the team discussing its excellent port to Quest. The game absolutely sings on the standalone headset, so this is a great opportunity to learn from a team that’s been through the wars.
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What sessions are you looking forward to at OC6 this year? We’ll be on the ground to bring you all the latest, so stay tuned.
We’ve heard from a growing list of VR developers who made it through Facebook’s stringent approval process for the Oculus Quest standalone VR headset and found a lot of buyers waiting to purchase their content on the other side.
While we still don’t have enough reports to nail down the specific size of the Quest market we are hearing enough indications of success from different sources to report that, at least for some developers, Oculus Quest is already performing better than the lifetime sales on some other platforms just four months after its May release and before what is likely going to be a big push this holiday season.
Red Matter And Superhot
Previously, we’ve heard from the developers of Red Matter who said “we have surpassed Red Matter’s all time sales on Rift in just a few days on Oculus Quest” and Superhot who said sales were 300% higher on Quest, calling the all-in-one VR system “a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too.”
We’ve also reached out to the developers behind popular games Job Simulator, Beat Saber, and Space Pirate Trainer as well as apps Virtual Desktop and SculptrVR, and these devs also indicate strong reception on Oculus Quest. We’ve reached out to more developers as well but some declined to comment.
Job Simulator
“Job Simulator has been a launch title for several platforms since its initial launch in 2016, and we’ve seen consistent success with each release across all platforms,” said Devin Reimer, the head of Google-owned Owlchemy Labs.
Beat Saber
Beat Games, the Prague-based studio behind Beat Saber, said that sales on Quest “exceeded our expectations.”
Space Pirate Trainer
I-Illusions is the development studio behind the defining wave shooter of VR’s first generation — Space Pirate Trainer. The game released in April 2016 on Valve’s Steam for the HTC Vive and again for Oculus Touch on the Oculus Store in December of that year. The game also released in May this year on Oculus Quest.
Space Pirate Trainer sold about double on Quest in the first week of sales compared separately with each of those previous launches. After one month, it sold about the same on Quest as on Steam. Interestingly, if you compare the first month sales of Space Pirate Trainer on Quest versus that same time period on the Oculus Store after Touch launched for Rift in December 2016, Quest still saw double the sales. According to the studio, “if we look at the current stats of Quest, it’s doing much better than Touch, much more than double.”
SculptrVR
The developers of SculptrVR and Virtual Desktop also shared with us their sales performance. On Rift, SculptrVR competed against Oculus’ own Medium sculpting app which is often bundled free with purchase of a headset. Though the app was first released for Steam in 2016 and since appeared on practically every major VR platform, Medium isn’t available on Quest and neither is Minecraft. After one week on Quest, SculptrVR “has already outsold Rift and Daydream and Gear/Go.”
“It has not yet reached 50% of my SteamVR sales and is about 1/6 my lifetime sales on PSVR,” SculptrVR’s primary creator Nathan Rowe wrote in a message. “Since Quest is a young platform that is growing rapidly, I believe the tail of sales will be much longer here than it was on PS4, so it will probably become my best selling platform by this time next year.”
Virtual Desktop
We also heard from Guy Godin — the developer of the incredibly useful utility app Virtual Desktop. For those unfamiliar, Virtual Desktop simulates a PC’s desktop interface inside a headset so that you can essentially do anything you can with your computer while sitting in VR. In June, the developer was forced by Facebook to remove a key feature from the version of the app available for purchase through Facebook’s Oculus Store. The feature essentially bridged Quest to Valve’s SteamVR platform and allowed players to enjoy their PC-based VR games inside the standalone VR headset. The system introduced some latency, though, which could result in comfort problems for players using the system. Godin complied with Facebook’s request for removal, he said, but he moved what is essentially a patch for the app to a sideloaded store called SideQuest. A growing list of developers are finding their way to SideQuest for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is Facebook’s stringent approval policy.
So how did Virtual Desktop sell in its first few weeks on Quest versus earlier platform launches?
Quest sales were “slightly lower than PC sales when Rift/Vive launched,” Godin wrote in a message. “Their decision to force me to remove the VR streaming feature is a pain in the butt because it is a very popular feature (about 30% of my users have the Sideloaded version). Sideloading makes the whole process more complicated for users and I have to do a lot more help/support.”
OC6
Later this month Facebook will host its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference. Last year at the event Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised Quest would deliver “Rift-quality experiences” — a comment which was met with some skepticism from the audience. Quest-approved developers underwent arduous and expensive rebuilding process to get their work ready for the Android-based system and in some cases the resulting ports are even better on Quest with wireless freedom. Still, we hope to see Facebook address the comment at OC6 or offer a way that developers could bring over more of the graphical power of a PC to Quest.
If you’re a developer and have something to share you can DM me on Twitter or send an email to ian@uploadvr.com. I’ll update this post if we hear from more developers about their reception on Oculus Quest.
We spoke with the developers of Superhot VR about porting the game to the Oculus Quest and opening up its potential to a platform without wires.
The game has changed: no longer do I have to stand there and wait for these crimson, crystalline enemies to come to me. I carefully walk using my actual legs right up to them and deck ‘em in their featureless faces. They shatter, and the screen fades to white and I find myself standing in the center of a new action scene.
“Superhot was built with mouse and keyboard in mind, but as soon as you’ve played it in VR, you instantly understood the next level of Superhot. And then you played it on Quest, things we didn’t design—it’s implicit in the game. You can hide under the table now. Or you can go around the corner,” Callum Underwood, producer of Superhot VR for Quest, says to UploadVR.
As many have already seen, Superhot VR (read our original Rift version review here) feels different on Oculus Quest. You are untethered, free to move through the balletic action game. The Superhot team worked a lot to make it happen—more on that shortly—but they are still working.
Just recently, a patch for the Quest version went live. Besides your typical bug-fixing, the patch added a new BIOS option screen to the game. It is accessible when you start up the game by holding the A and X buttons during the OS boot up. These screens allow you to modify the visuals a bit by dimming whites, to reduce the flickering at the edges that some people are sensitive to.
It also changes how the game behaves after you start it. The patch now allows three save files, giving players the ability to have different game states for different people. The team added this as they saw how the Quest version of Superhot VR was being played differently than past iterations.
“People are taking it to their friends and showing them Superhot. We added a Guest mode floppy, which you had to find. We expected people to Google it and find out how to do it,” Underwood says. “But now we added this fake BIOS setting screen, where you can choose which save file you are using, or launch directly into guest mode. Besides the bug we fixed, feedback was, ‘How do we make this better to show our friends?’ It’s nice to be one of those games that people want to show others.”
This new mode of play, bringing a VR headset to a friend’s house and showing it off, meant players wanted to show off the game from the beginning, not just jump them into the middle. And it wasn’t very intuitive how to do that originally. And once you did get friends inside, the Return pyramid that brought them back to the level select was present for these new players. It was confusing. That has been alleviated since players may now select a new save file and just start fresh.
But as mentioned earlier, this patch is only the latest set of changes the team had to make to get it optimized for Quest. When they began the task of porting the game over to the standalone VR headset about a year before launch, they realized that they had to throw out most of the code.
“The codebase we were working on was old as f**k,” Underwood says. “There’s bits of code in there from 2014. There was a ramping up of getting people used to the codebase. And it was never built with a mobile platform in mind. The tethered versus tether-less stuff was not a challenge at all. The tech challenge came from the fact that it was a mobile chipset.”
The team had to rewrite 98% of the graphical shaders. They had to rewrite almost every part of the game itself: how the bullets worked, how collision worked, how the enemies were built, and how the enemies moved.
“You’re talking about something that is a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful. Even from going from PlayStation VR to Quest is a huge jump. It’s a huge drop in overall compute power and GPU power. You have to think about things differently. The whole way the hardware works is different. There are huge differences between mobile GPUs and desktop GPUs. We just couldn’t use the existing stuff. They were designed for a completely different architecture. It takes this complete shift in perspective,” says Luke Thompson, lead programmer on Superhot VR for Quest.
The elegance of the resulting game may be a testament to the focus of the team and what they do.
“For me, and the rest of the team, it was just a fantastic challenge. It’s really hard. You are going down 100 times in power, but you are doing it for something that is really cool. You can’t really rely on the way of thinking you had before, especially with this new hardware,” Thompson says. “You have to start with baby steps: is this going to work? Yes or no? Is this going to work? Well, kind of, but we are going to have to redo some of it. The whole thing becomes an entirely new code base.”
“The success of Superhot as a company, and as a product across all different platforms, is largely due to the perfectionist attitude people here have,” Underwood says. “There is a lot of fine tuning. No one in a million years is going to notice any difference, but they have to be just right. We spent a long time fine tuning the color of the bloom in the new BIOS.”
To make the Quest launch, the team had to work closely with all involved. Things like animation weren’t even finished until just before launch. That assistance for the game helped. Underwood pointed to the Oculus engineers listed in the credits.
“This was all with Oculus,” Thompson says. “All the things we end up hitting, they were like, ‘That’s a new thing for us. That’s a new bug or that’s a new optimization that we’ve not done before.’ We were finding out what their hardware was doing at the same time as them. Toward the end, we had Unity make a custom version of Unity for us to get around a particular bug. That would never happen under any other circumstances. Oculus talking to Unity. Unity talking to Oculus. We’re talking to them both. It was this whole interconnected spaghetti mess of everyone figuring out how this new hardware works.”
The team was keen on getting Superhot ready for the Quest launch because there is cache to being a launch title, with extra marketing help to go along with the technical assistance. Not to mention, all the attention.
“Everyone’s eyeballs are on you when they check out what’s on the store,” Underwood says. “It means the platform is going to care about the fact that you’re there on day one, not only in terms of marketing, but also helping you get to that. Being there day one came down to how do we reach as many people at once, but we know, that being a launch title means you get special attention.”
And the team added some important design changes to this version for Quest. When they had a demo at OC5 last year, when Quest was officially announced, there was a demo sequence where players actually walked down a corridor to their room in the game. When the next sequence would load up, the player would sometimes be facing a wall. The team realized they had to make a change.
In the old versions of Superhot, there were pyramids placed in the center of the play space that would put players back in the center where they need to be and facing the correct way to be right in the middle of the action for the next sequence. And considering these were headsets that worked with front-facing experiences directly before cameras or sensors, such as Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, it was easy to calibrate the next level for players.
Not so with Quest. Walking and moving meant the old system would result in players looking at a wall. So they added two systems. The game automatically rotates to ensure that when the next scene begins, players are facing the correct way so they can just spring into action. The game also automatically centers the next level to where the player is standing, so they are in the correct place at the start—usually within grabbing distance of a weapon.
“The auto-rotation is because we don’t have a wire, we don’t have the constrained play space, we don’t have to care if the user is facing forward,” Thompson says. “So whatever way you are facing, the next level loads up facing you. We know where the center is because of this absolute positioning, because the Quest has mapped out the room you are in. So we didn’t really care if you were in the middle of the room or if you were facing the right way. It’s just a much more seamless experience.”
These changes made to the Quest version of Superhot VR, including the new BIOS, aren’t going to remain on just on Quest. The team has plans to move these quality of life improvements to other platforms. They also just pushed Valve Index and Knuckles support to the PC version of the game.
With Superhot now being played in a 360-degree space, will more games make that leap away from tethered VR design?
“I’m interested to see if VR games in general stop being front-facing. Out of the big 3 [VR platforms], 2 of them are front-facing. Vive is more 360 than others, but it still has a big-ass cable attached to it. So you still want some kind of grounding to the front. If it’s generally going to be 360, that might be interesting,” Underwood says. “I worry a little about that, because Superhot makes you feel like a superhero. Are you going to feel like a superhero if you have to move so much in real life and you’re spinning constantly around that you are basically doing the actions of the superhero? The game feeds you enemies in the way that you can do this ballet or dance. That’s going to be harder if you build the game from the ground up with 360.
“I’ve seen Beat Saber start to play around with 360, because there is already so much happening front on. Is it going to be improving the experience to be turning around? I genuinely don’t know. It might provide some more immersion, but that’s the last thing I’m thinking when I’m playing Beat Saber. I’m just trying to hit the box.”
So adapting Superhot even more to fit the large play area of Quest does not seem to be in the cards. But that doesn’t mean the team isn’t already working on the future.
“We would like to do—if you look at my tweets looking for developers, I’ve asked for people with experience with modding tools and level editors. I don’t want to talk too much about that, but we have plans that need people with that experience. And then, who knows about sequels? [Big smirk.] We can talk more about that when we know what’s happening,” Underwood says.
But any user-created options and/or sequel lies in the future, after the team has hired more Unity developers to support their next vision. They are focused on Quest right now. There will be another bug patch coming to Quest in a few weeks. For the team, support for the Quest platform has become integral to virtual reality.
“The launch of quest has been the first time that I’ve seen Games Industry friends, who have been naysayers of VR, want to buy a Quest,” Underwood says. “People have been tired of VR evangelists saying, ‘VR is here and it’s amazing.’ Where actually, it’s been good, but it’s been happening in steps. I don’t think there’s been enough tempering of expectations. There’s more that we can do, but I feel like it is moving along.”
And the Quest’s portability and the practice of people lugging it to another’s house means more than convenience.
“Sharing is going to be really important to this ‘generation’ of VR, if that’s the right term,” Thompson says. “It’s the first era where Word of Mouth will be more important than inorganic marketing. Up until now, it’s really been enthusiast stuff. As for the mass market, it feels like you need to have that Word of Mouth to get beyond the enthusiast VR market. I think the Quest is fantastic for that. And I think that’s going to be really important, not just for the Quest, but for VR in general.”
The studio behind the infectiously cool action game SUPERHOT VR (2017) say the Oculus Quest launch last week has brought them another big helping of success.
Superhot Team says in a press statement that on May 21st, Oculus Quest’s launch day, that the studio saw “300% higher sales than their launch on Oculus Rift.”
Superhot VR initially came to Rift on December 5th, 2016 as an Oculus Touch launch title. It later landed on Steam with support for HTC Vive, which ostensibly helped the game further build its profile as a ‘must play’ VR title.
Considering the game had already greatly benefited from name brand appeal thanks to its highly successful flatscreen version released in 2016, the revelation that Superhot VR has vastly outsold its initial PC VR launch in the first day could point to a much higher adoption rate of Oculus Quest.
“We’ve been amazed by the outstanding player reception on the Quest. It’s an outstanding piece of hardware that feels excitingly close to magic,” said Tom Kaczmarczyk, cofounder & director at SUPERHOT. “It represents a totally new quality in VR. It’s a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too.”
It’s important to note that Superhot VR was not among the handful of games and apps to allow cross-buy with Rift, meaning anyone who owned it previously from the Oculus Store (and consequently also Steam) would have to purchase it again. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear Quest users were looking to spend money on sure-fire wins, and it seems that Superhot VR easily fills that role as an already low-poly game with plenty of style to boot.
If you haven’t played Superhot VR yet, check out our in-depth review to see why we gave it a well deserved [9.1/10].
Superhot VR was one of around 50 titles available when Oculus’ new Quest headset arrived last week. Despite stiff competition, the development team says sales were 300% higher than when it first launched on Rift.
The developer didn’t provide any specifics, as to how long that launch window is or, indeed, how many units it sold on Quest. What we do know is that, before Quest launch, Superhot had sold 800,000 units across Rift, Vive, Windows VR and PSVR.
In a prepared statement, Tom Kaczmarczyk, Cofounder & Director at Superhot, said the team was “amazed” by the game’s reception. “[Quest is] a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too,” he said.
Notably, Superhot is one of several VR games that launched on Quest without cross-buy support on Rift. Cross-buy is an optional feature for developers, allowing them to provide players with both a Rift and Quest copy of the same game through Oculus Home. Many games, including Oculus’ own Studios-produced titles, have adopted the scheme. But some of VR’s biggest games, including Superhot, Beat Saber and Moss, confirmed to UploadVR that they wouldn’t support it.
Superhot VR first launched on Rift in December 2016, on the same day as the Oculus Touch controllers. Given the various factors and unknowns at play there, we couldn’t use this info to estimate how Quest is performing in relation to Rift. Still, it paints a positive picture.
Of course, it helps that Superhot VR is one of Quest’s best ports. It brings the entire original game to the standalone headset, which feels even better without the wire.
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