Virtual-reality company vrCAVE is ramping up to launch Heroes Together VR, the company's first direct-to-consumer game.
"The technology has changed; it's vastly simplified," Ryan Bromsgrove, vrCAVE's head of growth and marketing, told Taproot. "We decided that the market had changed enough and enough people were now into VR at home that this is something that we could do."
Heroes Together is a product of Basement Bunker Labs, a vrCAVE sub-brand created to help the company distinguish home games from its original bread and butter: social VR escape rooms designed for in-person play at arcades of sorts. When the seeds of vrCAVE were sown by founders Alex and Nathaniel Rossol in 2016, there wouldn't have been a significant market for direct-to-consumer products then because VR headsets cost around $2,000 and the PCs required to run them cost $2,000 or $3,000, Bromsgrove said.
The game-changer has been products such as Meta Quest, which consist of a headset and two controllers, with no need to connect to a PC. The Meta Quest 3 starts at $680, and the lighter 3S costs about $400. Bromsgrove estimated there are about 20 million Meta Quest devices out there among arcades and individual consumers, many of them members of Gen Z.
"Not only did we need people at home to have headsets, we needed people and their friends to have headsets," Bromsgrove said. "You're seeing younger people getting into home VR, rather than what was originally an older demographic that had the time and resources to really get into it."
Heroes Together is a roguelite-style game that places a player and up to three friends in a medieval-ish world, fighting off enemies such as ghostly skeletons or flying eyeballs with swords, bows, magic, or fists. You use your weapon to hack open vessels for treasure and power-ups, and the game's makers promise "countless secrets in hand-designed environments that are endlessly reconfigured every time you play." Your correspondent, a first-time VR gamer, adjusted to being a knight in the virtual world quickly, and while a demo involved a handful of vrCAVE staff at their office, the game can be played among friends remotely, just like conventional online gaming.
Bromsgrove recently got back from CES in Las Vegas, where vrCAVE took over an escape room for an unaffiliated event. There, the company gave influencers and other guests a chance to play Heroes Together, and things got a little raucous. One guest played as the archer and furiously rained arrows across the game environment while lying on the floor.
"I wouldn't necessarily recommend that," Bromsgrove said with a laugh. "But seeing them have a blast was really encouraging to us, because you spend all this time developing this game, and you're having fun with the internal team, but being able to see the public enjoy the game and how they're enjoying it (is really rewarding)."
Guests of vrCAVE will be able to play-test Heroes Together during a free event on Feb. 25 at Edmonton Unlimited. Basement Bunker is also accepting applications for alpha testers for the game, and it's available to wishlist on the Quest and Steam stores.
The event is also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Hospital of Horror, a haunted-house experience that predates vrCAVE's incorporation in 2017 by a year. Coincidentally, vrCAVE recently launched its 10th escape room game, Cyberscape.
A boss fight within Heroes Together VR, the direct-to-consumer game from Basement Bunker Labs, a division of vrCAVE. (Supplied)
Basement Bunker isn't the only way vrCAVE has diversified its revenue and customer base over the past decade. AlignVR is another division that tailors escape room puzzles to corporate hiring exercises and team-building events. Bromsgrove said arcade partners for vrCAVE games see the vast majority of their bookings between Fridays and Sundays, whereas they drop off for the rest of the week. But the dynamics in leisure settings are transferrable to the 9-5 world.
"When watching people play the escape room games, we were seeing all sorts of interesting social dynamics emerge, partly because we forced them to emerge by the design of the puzzles themselves," Bromsgrove said. "It's surprising how much people loosen up when they're in the social VR setting, where they're focused on a task. It gives you insights. This person who said they're a really good communicator, why aren't they sharing information? Or if they are sharing information, are they including everybody on the team?"
The AlignVR team works with businesses directly and with business coaches to administer the program in their own way, and the company generates reports with participation insights for clients. And just because AlignVR is designed for professionals, that doesn't mean it's no fun.
"The reports go into things like who talked the most, where people were physically located, who got responded to, and who didn't get responded to," he said. "In some cases, it's kind of funny. You watch a group and they see the stats, and someone says, 'Of course. This guy is always talking.'"