VR/AR/MR TRENDS
BEAT SABER, HALF-LIFE: ALYX AND STAR WARS BOLSTER VIRTUAL REALITY By CHRIS McGOWAN
Virtual reality had its ups and downs in 2020. The pandemic boosted VR home usage, but disrupted headset supply chains in Q2. In addition, theme parks and other location-based entertainment centers shut down, closing many VR attractions for part of the year. SuperData (a Nielsen company) projects total worldwide VR hardware and software revenue for 2020 of $3.2 billion, a slight drop from $3.3 billion the previous year, with that figure rising to $3.9 billion in 2021 and $6.2 billion in 2023. Among the bright notes: big tech firms continue to invest heavily in VR, hardware keeps improving, and breakthrough titles like Beat Saber, Half-Life: Alyx and Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series, along with a wide variety of new experiences, are luring new users. BEAT SABER
TOP: A player wearing virtual reality gear slashes the music beats with light sabers in the VR game Beat Saber, created by a small team of Czech video game developers. (Image copyright © 2018 Beat Games, Oculus Studios and Facebook) OPPOSITE TOP: The Azumel bartender Seezelslak will bend your ear with wild stories when you visit his cantina. Concept art for Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. (Image copyright © 2020 Lucasfilm and ILMxLAB) OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Fortress Vader on the planet Mustafar. From Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series. (Image copyright © 2019 Lucasfilm and ILMxLAB)
86 • VFXVOICE.COM WINTER 2021
PG 86-89 VR/AR.indd 86-87
Beat Saber has been something of a killer app for more than two years now and continues to inspire people to purchase their first virtual reality headsets. It is an addictive VR “rhythm game” in which the player slashes the cube-like “beats” of various pop songs with a pair of light sabers – kind of like Guitar Hero meets Star Wars. It was initially developed by Czech programmers Ján Ilavský and Vladimír Hrinčár, who had been building games together since high school and had published Chameleon Run, a mobile game that won an Apple Design Award in 2016. After that, they decided to build a game for VR and posted
a demo of Beat Saber on Facebook, which was seen by composer Jaroslav Beck, who was living in Los Angeles. When he discovered that Ilavský and Hrinčár were also Czech, he flew to Prague to see them and convinced them to let him create the soundtrack for the new game. He also pushed them to finish it. Together, they formed Beat Games. They released an “early access” version of Beat Saber in May 2018, with an official “full release” coming a year later (Beat Games was purchased by Facebook through Oculus Studios in November 2019). Beat Saber comes with 10 songs and can be expanded with downloadable content (DLC) packs containing multiple songs. In addition to Beck, artists include Imagine Dragons, Panic! at the Disco, Green Day, Linkin Park and Timbaland. Beat Saber won many video game awards and in 2019 became the first VR-only game on Steam’s Top Sellers list (in the bronze category). To date, it
has sold some two million copies, along with 10 million songs as DLC, according to Beat Games, and its gamer videos have tallied over two billion total views on YouTube. HALF-LIFE: ALYX
Half-Life: Alyx is another current VR killer app and is a virtualreality, first-person shooter developed and published by Valve Software. It required a four-year production involving 80 people and launched March 23, 2020. It achieved nearly universal acclaim. SuperData claims the title sold 680,000 copies its first month of release (including pre-orders), generating approximately $40 million in revenue, and Half-Life: Alyx led to a leap of nearly one million users on Steam in April, according to the distribution service. In the VR game, Earth has been colonized by an alien empire called the Combine. Game players control the actions of Alyx Vance, who
WINTER 2021 VFXVOICE.COM • 87
12/16/20 2:11 PM
