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Beat Games explain how Beat Saber became VR's killer app
A simple idea for a rhythm game in VR turned into one of the most successful titles of recent years, but Beat Saber still has a long way to go before it's done. The developers tell us more.
Beat Saber is the game that people buy VR headsets for. There's a ton of great VR games, but none manage to sell how great VR can be quite as well as Beat Saber. Its concept is easy to understand, the benefits of it being in VR are obvious and, most importantly, it looks like great fun to play. Smashing blocks in time to the rhythm, amazing visuals and some challenging combinations is a simple concept, but Beat Saber has executed it almost perfectly.
After years of development, Beat Saber finally came out of early access last month, adding crucial features, such as a level editor, and generally improving the general experience. While the development team certainly isn't done with Beat Saber by any stretch of the imagination, it does represent a big milestone for the team. They've finally launched a game that's already one of the best-selling VR games ever.
"I was expecting that Beat Saber would be successful title, but I definitely didn't expect that it would blow up so massively," says Jaroslav Beck, CEO and co-founder of Beat Games. "When I joined the team, both Ján [Ilavský, Beat Games COO] and Vladimir [Hrinčár, Beat Games CTO] thought that if we sold 50,000 units, it would be a big success. I told them that I think we'll sell a little bit more."
While exact sales stats haven't been released, we do know that earlier this year Beat Saber broke past one million copies sold, surpassing those initial expectations by a long way. With the recent release of the Oculus Quest and Beat Saber port for that new platform, sales are once again expected to see another big bump.
Of course, with such a large player base, a hardcore community quickly popped up, mastering the art of Beat Saber and pulling off some incredible physical feats. Many of the top players utilise subtle flicks of the wrist instead of completely moving their entire arm, which can result in a lot of small movements the hardware has to pick-up. In fact, players got so good at the game that VR manufacturers have had to iterate on their tracking software to keep up with them.
"Players are actually pushing the limits of tracking in VR," says Back. "So, we're working with those manufacturers on how to push the tracking to the limits. Even the guys from Valve, they were actually adjusting the tracking for their controllers and they had to update the version, because they've seen that the Beat Saber players are faster than they thought is humanly possible. So, we're trying to push the technology a little bit forward."
Who knew hitting blocks could be so fun? Mario was onto something
© Beat Games
The massive community also presented some other challenges for the team behind Beat Saber. As you might expect for a PC-based rhythm game, players immediately wanted to be able to play other songs that weren't included in the game's soundtrack. The Beat Saber official levels are great, but it's not quite the same as being able to bop away to some Daft Punk, Cascada, or even the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, so players quickly created mods that allowed them to import custom songs to the game.
"We really wanted to bring custom levels into into the game from the very beginning," says Beck. "The only thing is that we needed to be sure how to do that better, so there wouldn't be any problems with the use of songs and stuff like that. Therefore, we can't officially support mods, because they're using music which isn't licensed."
A level editor has been added to the PC version with the official release, but with so many songs available via mods already, most feel that the addition is coming a little too late to make any kind of real impact. However, just because there's a level editor and a modding scene that's already created more custom songs than anyone could reasonably play, that doesn't mean the community is unwilling to buy music packs. The first pack was a big success and the team has just announced a second, with big plans for future content packs.
"We just announced that on June 10 there'll be a new music pack, which will be the first that won't contain electronic music, because most of the songs in Beat Saber so far are purely electronic music," says Beck. "We're discovering more and more fields and we'll definitely be collaborating with the biggest artists. This is amazing, because big labels and huge artists are contacting us directly and trying to find ways to cooperate.
"Beat Saber, with the visuals, the electronic music just fits. We definitely want to discover more styles, but we need to be sure that it'll fit the visuals. There will be more music styles, but we need to tweak the visuals a little bit for it to feel natural, because what we don't want to do is bring random songs from random genres to the game with how it's looking right now. We just need to tweak a little bit."
Being able to add other types of music to Beat Saber will surely make it much more appealing to even more people, especially those on PlayStation, who currently don't have the ability to use mods and custom songs and are instead limited to the officially release tracks from Beat Games.
Even with the somewhat limited styles of music on offer, Beat Saber is without a doubt one of the best VR games out there and that's the result of a ton of work from the small team developing it. When the co-founders of the studio came up with the initial idea, they had no idea that Beat Saber would become such a phenomenon, but just a few years on they've just officially launched a game that's sold over a million copies while in early access.
The future looks really bright for Beat Saber, but they aren't necessarily too bothered about racking up a few more million in sales – they'd much rather sustain their position as VR's killer app and continue to give people brand-new experiences with the exciting technology.
"I hope that people who get into VR who've never tried it before will try Beat Saber as the first game," says Beck. "When we started to work on the game, it was that moment where some people thought that VR could be the next big thing. However there were also people who thought VR had been here for a couple of years already and nothing happened, so there was a lot of scepticism. It's actually awesome and kind of a responsibility to be in the position where we're at the moment, because a lot of people are buying the hardware because of Beat Saber.
"We're really in a close relationship with most of the companies behind that hardware, because we want the game to be simply the best possible experience you can have in VR, where there'll be no motion sickness, it'll be super fun to play and fun to watch."
