Sandbox VR, the location-based VR destination, announced that its most popular experience has generated $23 million in ticket sales in the last 12 months.
Launched in the summer of 2022, Deadwood Valley is said to be the company’s most cinematic game, letting players defend against a horde of zombies as a squad.
It’s been so successful, Sandbox VR says the experience has now surpassed $23 million in ticket sales across 30 locations, and is projected to make $100 million in lifetime sales.
All of the company’s multiplayer VR experiences have been developed by in-house gaming studios, allowing teams of up to six players to tackle a host of missions in games such as Star Trek Discovery: Away Mission, Curse of Davy Jones, Deadwood Mansion, and Unbound Fighting League. An experience based on Squid Game is also set to launch sometime in late 2023.
In addition to recently opening its second in-house gaming studio in Vancouver, the company says it will also start letting third-party game developers to create titles for its location-based platform starting in 2024.
Billing itself as the world’s fastest growing location-based VR company, Sandbox VR is now operating in 43 locations spanning major cities in North America, Europe, and Asia, a dozen of which launched in the last 12 months.
If you’re in Japan right now, you could be the first to play the new, officially licensed Street Fighter VR arcade experience, which pits you against some of the universe’s most iconic warriors.
Capcom released a trailer this week for the single-player arcade game, called Street Fighter VR Shadaloo Enhancement Plan (ストリートファイターVR シャドルー強化計画). It isn’t just a brand engagement vehicle that’s flavored like Street Fighter; hands-on reports suggest it’s actually a pretty solid basis for what might be an honest-to-goodness VR game one day if Capcom really wanted to put the effort in.
According to a hands-on by GAME Watch (Japanese language), Street Fighter VR recruits you as a junior soldier of the evil secret society ‘Shadaloo’, led by M Bison. Matched up against the warriors of Street Fighter V, you battle up the ranks to become the strongest.
The game, which plays on HTC Vive Pro 2, is said to first offer a basic training mode stage which was ostensibly ported directly from Street Fighter V. Although the number of attacks you can do are limited to punches and fist-focused moves like Hadouken and Shoryuken, the rules of the VR game are the same as the original, GAME Watch reports.
Opponents include Ryu, Zangief and M Bison (known as ‘Vega’ in Japan), although another opponent was seen in Capcom’s official art, including what appears to be the shadowy silhouette of Blanka at the end of the trailer. So maybe more yet to come? As it is, if you don’t win a single match, there are actually eight different endings depending on what you play—sounds like a fair amount of replayability.
“To be honest, before playing it, I thought it was just a VR game with a Street Fighter motif,” Hiroyuki Endo of GAME Watch writes, “but when I actually touched it, there were fighting game elements everywhere, and I was surprised that I was able to enjoy a full-fledged Street Fighter in a VR game from a first-person perspective.”
Street Fighter VR kicked off on February 17th at the Plaza Capcom Store in Hiroshima, Japan, priced at ¥1,200 (~$9 USD) per gameplay session. It’s also set to expand on April 17th to Miraino Aeon Mall in Toyokawa, Japan.
There’s really no indication whether we’ll see a release outside of Japan, although we’ve seen similar projects make it across thanks to sustained popular demand, such as the once Japan-only Mario Kart VR racer—so it doesn’t seem too farfetched if Street Fighter fans are vocal enough.
Note: We’ve corrected the name ‘Shadroo’ to ‘Shadaloo’. Thanks go to our reader ‘IIDX’!
Spatial Ops is a new multiplayer mixed reality shooter from Resolution Games, the studio behind Blaston, Demeo, and Ultimechs. It’s out now on SideQuest and you can play in the open beta for free starting today, however we got an advanced look during a trip to the developer’s Stockholm-based studio, which thankfully had a big enough area to host all-out 4v4 matches.
In short: Spatial Ops is bringing an arcade-level VR team shooter experience to consumers in sort of the same waySpace Pirate Arena did, albeit with way more players and a greater ability to configure play spaces. It also hopes to ignite a new eSport thanks to some familiar shooter mechanics that basically anyone can pick up just as easily as grabbing dual Tommy guns, or a rocket launcher and blasting away.
Ok, there are more technical bits to think about, but more importantly you probably want to know how we got on with Spatial Ops.
VR Arcade Action, Consumer Target
Spatial Ops made for some intense and fun battles—the sort of stupid fun that makes you forget you should be seriously previewing a never-before played game instead of getting on the ground and worming your way under a hail of gunfire and laughing like a madman all the way.
The game supports up to eight players using either Quest 2 or Quest Pro, although you can go it alone with bots if you’re lacking the requisite number of brains attached to headsets—at least one besides you for either a mano a mano duel, or a bot-hunting extravaganza. It’s an in-development project, so I’m sure we’ll see a more refinement as the team continues work, but the game already has all of the basic bits in place to make for one hell of a fun time.
Here’s a gander at the release trailer, which is actually very representative of the time we had in Stockholm:
What the trailer doesn’t show is that spawn points are placed on opposite sides of the arena, so teams will not only start there before the match begins, but also need to individually trundle back there to respawn—provided you didn’t manage to toss a healing vial at your feet for an extended run, that is.
You can pick those health packs up along with randomly selected guns at specific spawn points throughout the playing field. You’ll be able to arm yourself with Tommy guns, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles with working scopes, rocket launchers, grenades, and a riot shield that adds the only opportunity for armor in the game. Once a gun is empty, just toss it and head for the nearest weapon spawn point.
We played a ton of matches, which not only gave me a good feel for each weapon, but also for how tiring it can be to sprint around what to outsiders looks like an empty room. To us though, it was crammed with virtual crates and barriers to hide behind, which made for some natural choke points where the action really popped off.
Image courtesy Resolution Games
All of that can be configured in a level editor beforehand though, which gives you a lot of latitude to customize the playing field to the intended place space. As you’d imagine, tactics change according to the game mode you’re playing too. At launch, there are four modes available: Team Deathmatch, Domination, Capture the Flag, and Free-for-All.
We played on both Quest 2 and Quest Pro, although there’s some unexpected advantages to Quest 2 here thanks to its monochrome passthrough. Spatial Ops is a mixed reality game that necessarily fills a lot of the playing field with virtual imagery, so in this case passthrough really only gives you a clear idea of where not to go. Enemies and barriers ‘pop’ more on Quest 2, although you can’t deny how much more immersive the full-color passthrough of Quest Pro is, adding just a touch more realism to the whole thing.
Shooting a bot | Image courtesy Resolution Games
Since Meta hasn’t released concurrency for Quest, which means Quests can’t ‘see’ each other in a shared space, the game needs a common reference point to calibrate each user to the playing field. In our case, it was a pillar on the side of the room that every player had to carefully make sure was lined up just right. It’s crucial to get calibration correct, otherwise your perception of a player’s virtual position in the game and actual position on the field may be off, which would cause unwanted contact between players.
Here’s a good look at how that’s done:
The headline says ‘At-Home Play’, but that’s really only applicable if you have ready access to a big space. That’s a distinct barrier of entry alongside needing an adequate number of VR headset-owning friends for full effect.
We played in an area around 10×10m (33×33 feet), which was notably larger than the Quest 2’s guardian typically allows, hence the need for distribution on SideQuest and not the Quest Store proper. If you’re like me, you probably only have a space just big enough for room-scale VR stuff; in some ideal future, everyone I know has an MR-capable headset and we all meet up at the local indoor basketball court for a few matches. Online play is possible provided each user has enough space, although Spatial Ops is really a local multiplayer game in spirit.
In the end, Spatial Ops is opening up arcade-style gaming to the general public, which will be interesting to see unfold. Are there enough Quest 2 or Quest Pros out there for the game to make sense as an eSport? Will players find each other and auto-organize into local teams, matches and maybe even tourneys—like you might see with the obvious analogues of airsoft, paintball or laser tag? We’ll be waiting to see, but in the meantime you can nab Spatial Ops on SideQuest for free to try out for yourself.
Disclosure: Resolution Games assisted with travel & lodging expenses to an event where information for this article was gathered.
