Valve today announced the top 20 best selling games on Steam released in March. And coming as little surprise to anyone, Half-Life: Alyx (2020) has made it on the list.
In its monthly top sales list, Valve is accounting for two weeks of sales, which helps put Half-Life: Alyx on more equal footing with the rest of the games released during the entire month of March. However you slice it, making the top 20 on Steam is an achievement for any title, let alone a VR game.
You’ll see plenty of familiar faces below, including Borderlands 3, DOOM Eternal, and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Valve has organized the list according to release date, and not overall revenue as such, so it’s hard to tell where it fits on the list.
Although Valve hasn’t released official numbers on how many copies it’s sold to date, SteamSpyestimates there are currently between 500,000 – 1,000,000 owners, putting the game’s revenue at around $25 – $50 million should those numbers at all reflect reality. Even at half that estimation, Half-Life: Alyx is well positioned to be the best selling VR game to date.
March’s Steam Top 20 List
Black Mesa – Crowbar Collective
Yes, Your Grace – Brave At Night
Avorion – Boxelware
Ori and the Will of the Wisps – Moon Studios & Xbox Game Studios
DJMAX RESPECT V – NEOWIZ
Borderlands 3 – Gearbox Software
Granblue Fantasy: Versus – Cygames, Inc. & Arc System Works
State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition – Undead Labs & Xbox Game Studios
AI＊Shoujo/AI＊少女 – ILLUSION
DOOM Eternal – id Software
Panzer Corps 2 – Flashback Games
Half-Life: Alyx – Valve
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III – Nihon Falcom, Engine Software & PH3
Bright Memory – FYQD-Studio
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms – Codename Entertainment
Last Oasis – Donkey Crew
ONE PIECE: PIRATE WARRIORS 4 – Koei Tecmo
One Step From Eden – Thomas Moon Kang
Biped – NEXT Studios
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – TaleWorlds Entertainment
Social VR app VRChat is seeing a surge of users thanks to a well timed update and people around the world looking to connect with others while being asked to stay at home.
VRChat is a social VR app which lets VR and non-VR users connect to chat and explore worlds and experiences created by the game’s community. The app went viral back in 2018, bringing an unbelievable 17x rise in usership over the course of just a month to a peak of 20,000 concurrent users of the game on Steam. While that spike quickly faded, a surprising number of users stuck around, with roughly 8,500 concurrent users on Steam for quite some time.
Since July 2019, VRChat has steadily grown from 7,600 concurrent users on Steam to more than 12,000 at the end of February 2020.
But there was much more to come, spurred by the Coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home orders imposed by many locales around the world. On April 13th, VRChat hit its highest usership since its big viral spike back in 2018, reaching just over 16,000 concurrent Steam users.
Data courtesy SteamDB
Interestingly, this recent growth spurt has also brought a surge in Twitch viewership which has exceeded the number of Twitch viewers during the game’s original viral spike. This time around, the Twitch spike doesn’t seem to correlate as closely with the rise in concurrent users.
Data courtesy SteamDB
Now, of course, it’s important to remember that VRChat isn’t a VR-only game, it supports a desktop-mode as well. I wanted to know if the rapid growth was mostly just desktop users rather than actual VR users; when I took the question to VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor, I was surprised to find the opposite.
Gaylor told me that compared to March 2018, VRChat desktop users were up 50% while VR users were up 125%. Between all platforms, the breakdown between desktop and VR users is around 70% and 30% respectively.
While one could multiply 30% by the latest peak and figure that there’s was some 4,800 concurrent VR users on VRChat, that’s only a portion of the actual figure as it doesn’t account for those playing VRChat on Quest or Rift through the Oculus store.
Gaylor also pointed to factors beyond the Coronavirus that have been driving the growth of VRChat. On April 1st, the app was updated to version 2020.1.1, which the studio said was its “biggest release” to date. The update included a heap of new features including the ‘Udon’ alpha—a custom programming language designed to make it easier for creators to make cool content for VRChat—and a new IK system which increases the fidelity of motion-tracked movements in the game.
Pixel Ripped 1995 is a retro-inspired VR game which, as you would imagine, follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, Pixel Ripped 1989 (2018). It’s an absolute nostalgia trip that revisits the series’ unique ‘game within a game’ storytelling style while honing in on what made the fourth console generation truly great: colorful platformers, side-scrolling beat ’em ups, and RPGs aplenty. While it may be a tiny bit rough around the edges, it’s ultimately a charming and well-realized adventure that truly made me feel like a kid again.
Pixel Ripped 1995 Details:
Developer: ARVORE Immersive Experiences Available On: Steam, Oculus Store (Rift , Quest) Reviewed On: Quest, Rift Release Date: April 23rd, 2020 Price: $20
Gameplay
As with the first in the series, Pixel Ripped 1995 is all about playing fictional games based classics from the era. That is, until things get weird and the game suddenly breaks outside of the confines of your family’s CRT and spills over into the physical world.
Much of what we see in the 1989 original and the 1995 sequel is here: sneaking in as much gaming as humanly possible for a kid, distracting adults, and playing the many mashups between 2D and 3D as the overworld and the game world inevitably collide throughout its linear story.
Although you should probably play the first one, you don’t really need to, as everything is explained within the first five minutes anyway. Suffice it to say you go in and out of these retro and real world gaming sessions fighting against the evil goblin-like Cyblin Lord as both the nine year-old protagonist David and the badass game character ‘Dot’ who is seemingly styled after Samus Aran.
Image courtesy ARVORE Immersive Experiences
I’ll come right out and say it: I am totally the target market for Pixel Ripped 1995. I was 10 years old in 1995, and I can’t pretend that it doesn’t strike a chord with me by literally putting me barefoot in front of a color CRT, staring up at a demo station in a faux Blockbuster, or in an arcade playing one of those four-player side-scrollers.
As a child of the era, it’s easy to see where ARVORE is paying homage here in its near-beer game versions—of course while staying a respectful distance away from copyrighted content. That said, you’ll feel like you’re playing Super Mario World (1990), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991), Super Metroid (1994), Streets of Rage (1991), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), Crash Bandicoot (1996), Star Fox (1993) and more I can’t even begin to remember—and all of it mashed up into the fun and weird meta game of you trying to defeat the patently evil Cyblin Lord. Some of this interplay is built on distraction: e.g you have to shoot a baddie with your ‘real world’ Nerf gun while you continue to play the game with the d-pad and A/B buttons, making VR an essential component to nearly every 2D game interaction.
Image courtesy ARVORE Immersive Experiences
Granted, because you play so many game styles throughout Pixel Ripped 1995, you never really get a chance to truly dig deeply into each one, which can feel a bit premature at times. I can totally respect its emphasis on making the mashups between real and game world novel, fun, and well-paced though, which helps underline the fact that Pixel Ripped 1995 isn’t a glorified emulator for knock-off games, but rather a mind-bending VR adventure that’s busy enough trying to tell a heartfelt story and giving you a near-lethal concentration of nostalgia at the same time.
Image courtesy ARVORE Immersive Experiences
Still, I would have loved to stay in each game for longer and at a higher level of difficulty, although at a playthrough time of about 5 hours, I can’t really complain too much. The variety and inventiveness of the whole thing makes up for it to a large extent, as you’re always left guessing at what’s next.
Pixel Ripped 1995 is a linear game that keeps you physically stationary nearly 100 percent of the time, so there’s no room for exploration outside of that which is done on-screen, which I feel like was somewhat of a missed opportunity. Although I was hoping to get a better chance to roam around for a more in-depth adventure this time around, perhaps ARVORE is saving that for a future sequel.
Immersion
Pixel Ripped 1995 has a penchant to stray into some very ‘gamey’ territory when it would be better served with a more clarified dose of reality, if only to better divide the two worlds the story is presenting. I don’t mean to come off as too harsh—the basic bones of Pixel Ripped 1995 are super strong—but some of the ancillary things that don’t affect gameplay itself are objectively detractors from the overall experience.
Oftentimes I was scratching my head as to why my objectively ‘real’ Nerf gun has infinite darts, why I can shoot someone in the face and they won’t react at all, and why objects respawn around my blindingly stupid mother who goes through a loop of dialogue seemingly at random. More polish in these areas would have helped sell the real world as ‘real’, and help set the stage for what ultimately becomes a 16-bit fever dream.
Image courtesy ARVORE Immersive Experiences
Looking at NPCs in the overworld can also be a bit painful visually at times, like the Mom, Dad, and neighbor kid. Although they’re safely on the cartoon side of the Uncanny Valley, overworld character animations can be pretty off-putting to look at, with facial expressions and mouth movements appearing more like a sock puppet than the Pixar-ish setting and characters would otherwise suggest.
Although some of these things leave Pixel Ripped 1995 rough around the edges, the game is chock-full of excellent voice acting, and also rests on strong enough writing to tell a heartfelt, albeit basic, overarching story.
Comfort
Since you’re presented with linear flatscreen gaming scenarios, more often than not you’re frontward-facing and sitting down in the game itself, so there’s no artificial first-person locomotion at all to speak of: no teleportation, free locomotion, snap-turning, nada, zip, zilch.
Although it may detract from a sense of agency, it is ultimately the most comfortable way to play a VR game. With the exception of a short car ride and a few moments when you’re lifted up into the sky, you will almost always be stationary, making it an easy game to suggest for new and experienced players alike.
Pistol Whip (2019), the VR rhythm-shooter from Cloudhead Games, just got a new dielselpunk-inspired update, available now on Oculus Quest and SteamVR-compatible headsets.
Called ‘Dark Skies’, the update includes a new level set on Zeppelin, replete with hanger bay and plenty of cinematic flair. Like many of the game’s other levels, ‘Dark Skies’ takes inspiration from a few works of fiction, namely the airship scene in Ninja Gaiden, The Rocketeer (1991), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).
The update also includes three wartime-era pistols, and a new metal finish for all available weapons. Broomhandle Mauser, anyone?
Image courtesy Cloudhead Games
Cloudhead calls its latest content drop “the penultimate entry to our monthly Pistol Whip updates as we begin to move toward our long-term roadmap.” The studio says a major update is also planned for later this year.
‘Dark Skies’ comes hot on the heels of Pistol Whip’s most recent update in March, which arrived with a Mad Max-inspired scene called ‘Full Throttle’ and a number of goodies including new modifiers, new weapons, and new weapon skins.
Launched in November last year, Pistol Whip took Road to VR’s 2019 SteamVR Game of the Year Award for its uncanny ability to marry rhythm and shooting in the stylish and interesting worlds that, thanks to its many successive updates, has grown past its original John Wick vibe.
You can nab Pistol Whip for $25 via Steam and Viveport for your standard mix of SteamVR headsets, and the Oculus Store for Rift and Quest.
Pixel Ripped 1995 (2020), the retro-gaming inspired VR adventure from indie creators ARVORE, launched on Quest and PC VR headsets late last month. Now the studio is bringing the acclaimed title to PSVR today in the US, with availability in Europe coming a week later.
Update (May 12, 2020): Pixel Ripped 1995 is coming to US-based PSVR users starting today, priced at $20. As previously announced, European availability is slated to arrive on May 19th.
Update (May 6th, 2020): Pixel Ripped 1995 is slated to arrive on PSVR May 12th in the US, and on May 19th in the EU, ARVORE says in a recent tweet. The studio says it will be revealing more updates and features soon.
We gave Pixel Ripped 1995 a very solid [8.5/10] in our full review, in part thanks to its admirable job of paying homage to the 16-bit and early 32-bit games of the mid-90s, and wrapping it in an immersive ‘game within a game’. Make sure to check out our spoiler-free review to find out more.
The original article detailing the game’s launch on PC VR & Quest follows below:
Original Article (April 15th, 2020): In the original Pixel Ripped1989 (2018) players don a VR headset to be immersed in a VR world that itself contains authentically inspired 2D games of the era. Gameplay creatively and progressively crosses the boundaries between the 2D games and the VR game world.
The upcoming sequel, Pixel Ripped 1995, takes this same approach but further tracks the progression of gaming into the 16-bit and 32-bit eras. The game’s new launch trailer below gives a rough idea of how this works in the gameplay.
When I tried an early version of Pixel Ripped 1995 last year, I was extremely impressed with how authentically the game captures the essence of the retro-games that it draws upon. With clear homages to games like Mega Man X (1993) and Super Castlevania IV (1991), everything from the pixel art to the music felt true to form, making the games-within-a-game fun in their own right.
Image courtesy ARVORE
The indie studio behind the game, ARVORE, announced today that the Pixel Ripped 1995 release date is April 23rd for most major headsets (Quest, Rift, Steam, and Viveport). The game is also due to launch on PSVR but no specific date was given other than “very soon.” (see update)
The Under Presents (2019), the multiplayer theatrical adventure originally built for Quest and Rift, is heading to Steam on April 16th, which includes support for all standard SteamVR-compatible headsets.
Created by indie studio Tender Claws, known for its breakout hit VR experience Virtual Virtual Reality (2017), and the New York-based live theater company Pie Hole, The Under Presents is a different type of game—and that’s putting it lightly.
Described by its creators as “part game, part theater, part extravaganza,” The Under Presents includes a mashup of real-time and recorded performances from actors, and a time and mind-bending multiplayer environment centered around ‘The Under’, a special dimension outside time and space, where you are guided by a mysterious proprietor.
We haven’t had a chance to review The Under Presents, however users have given it near [5/5] ratings on both the Quest and Rift platforms. It’s certainly an experience unlike any other. Check it out on Steam here.
Beat Saber (2018) is a great tool if you’re stuck indoors and want to stay fit. To keep you up and moving, Beat Games today released their latest free track, called ‘FitBeat’, which aims to get your heart pumping to its high BMP, obstacle-laden track.
The new song, which looks to include plenty of walls to dodge to keep you on your toes, is offered through a few modes, including Standard, One Saber and 360°/90° Modes.
“We just wanted to bring you a fun song and get you pumped,” says Beat Games, which released the track today on all supported VR platforms, including SteamVR headsets, PSVR, and Oculus Quest. Like many of the early tracks, ‘FitBeat’ was created by Jaroslav Beck, the co-founder and head of music at Beat Games.
To date, Beat Saber has sold more than 2 million copies and 10 million songs via DLC, making it one of the (if not “the”) most successful VR games out there. Since being acquired by Facebook, the studio has managed to wrangle licensing deals with a number of well known artists such as Imagine Dragons, Green Day, Panic at the Disco!, and Timbaland, all of which no doubt gives them more incentive to keep the free tracks flowing.
Check out this player who already conquered FitBeat on Expert+.
Ever since last year’s Beyond update to No Man’s Sky, which among other things brought VR support to the galactic sandbox game, there seems to be a steady stream of content still rolling out from developers Hello Games. Now, players on all platforms, including PSVR and PC VR, can pilot their very own bipedal mech.
Called the ‘Minotaur Heavy Exocraft Hybrid’, the mech gives players a new way of exploring planets and collecting resources.
Arriving with a jetpack, immunity to all planetary hazards, upgradable mining lasers, and the ability to outfit the Exocraft with solar panels to recharge their engines during daylight, the Minotaur certainly sounds like something worth researching an unlocking.
As an added bonus, VR players get an immersive first-person, in-cockpit view and to joysticks to control the mech’s movement.
This month’s Exo Mech update follows February’s Living Ship update which brought to the game bio-mechnical crafts that you can grow and fly your own living space ship.
While there aren’t any official Avatar: The Last Airbender VR games out there, RUMBLE definitely wants to fill in the gaps with its Earthbending fighting game where, like the series’ telekinetic martial artists, you control the very ground beneath your feet.
Headed into Steam Early Access soon, Rumble is an online PVP game that tasks you with honing your ability to attack and defend by striking different poses, something developer Buckethead Entertainment says are inspired by several styles of martial arts.
“Chain poses together, flowing from one on to the next to create a pose combo! Pose combos have different effects based on the poses used, all combos are unique, and there’s a situation for every single one,” Buckethead says on the game’s Steam page. “You don’t just use attacks, you create them. Train yourself up in the gym and once you’re confident you’ve got what it takes, you can put your skills and creativity to the test in the arena.”
Rumble is slated to launch sometime soon on Steam Early Access for PC VR headsets. Buckethead says an Oculus Quest version isn’t entirely off the table, however the studio still needs to conduct research regarding the game’s performance and tracking on Quest.
At the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx last year, Valve promised it would release Source 2 tools which would allow the community to extend the game’s content and functionality. Now, two weeks after the launch of the game, Valve says it’s presently working on the tools but isn’t ready to share a release date just yet.
Half-Life: Alyxlaunched to critical acclaim, and as more players finish the game, hunger is growing for mods and community content that will give players even more to do in Alyx.
Last year Valve announced that “a set of Source 2 tools for building new levels will be available for the game, enabling any player to build and contribute new environments for the community to enjoy,” and that ‘Hammer’, the studio’s level authoring tool, has been “updated with all of the game’s virtual reality gameplay tools and components.”
Two weeks post-release, Valve tells Road to VR that the company is ‘currently working on Source 2 modding tools’, but isn’t ready to share a specific release date. At this point, it isn’t clear if the wait will be weeks or months, nor do we know to what extent the Coronavirus situation—with Valve employees moving to work-from-home—may have altered the expected timeline.
While those of us who have completed the game may be hungry for community-made content, it turns out that we’re still well in the minority; it can be seen from achievements for Half-Life: Alyx that only 23% of players have completed the game to date.
