Category Archives: Games

Perennial VR Classic ‘Job Simulator’ Hits 6 Million Installs, Averaging 600,000 Units Annually

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Google-owned XR studio Owlchemy Labs announced that its breakout VR hit Job Simulator (2016) has now surpassed six million installs.

Job Simulator has been one of the most successful VR games over the past decade, having not found firm footing as a launch title for the original HTC Vive, PSVR, and Oculus Touch back in 2016, but also for having pioneered many of the fundamentals VR developers rely on today.

In short, the madcap simulator parody was one of the first to really nail VR object interaction while serving up immersive room-scale gameplay.

And while you’d expect a bulk of those 6 million installs to come from its earliest days as a regular chart topper, it wasn’t until early 2020 that Job Simulator officially went platinum, selling over 1 million copies.

By then, Job Simulator had already found its next wave of success on Quest, later coming to PSVR 2 and Apple Vision Pro in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Notably, the number of installs probably doesn’t directly reflect units sold—decidedly a more direct measure of its success with consumers—although it may not be that far off.

In 2016, Job Simulator came free with HTC Vive for a limited time, which may count towards installs and not sales as such. It was also included in Meta’s Horizon Plus subscription games service in March 2025, which lets Quest users download select titles and keep them as long as they’re subscribers. That’s another place the studios might feel more confident counting install numbers and not sales.

Another place is VR arcades. In 2024, leading software distributor SpringboardVR said Job Simulator was their top-performing game thanks to its popularity with kids and VR first-timers. And those arcades weren’t buying Job Simulator—SpringboardVR is a games subscription service with an enterprise-focused licensing structure.

In addition to the news, Owlchemy Labs announced its free-to-play multiplayer Quest game Dimensional Double Shift crossed the one million download mark just over a year after its open beta launch, with the studio noting that the Job Sim-style social game recently became its fastest-growing title, with players logging 2.5 million total hours since its open beta launch in September 2024.

The post Perennial VR Classic ‘Job Simulator’ Hits 6 Million Installs, Averaging 600,000 Units Annually appeared first on Road to VR.

Attending Lakers Games In Apple Immersive Plays To VR’s Strengths

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Watching an NBA game in the Apple Vision Pro feels like a glimpse of where sports and entertainment need to go, even if the path forward is still taking shape. Apple is clearly experimenting with what watching sports can feel like when you are no longer locked into a flat television broadcast.

I recently went onto the court at an immersive Lakers game from the confines of Ian Hamilton’s Vision Pro I borrowed from him in New York City. This was not a live broadcast, I watched the game on demand via the Spectrum SportsNet app, after the fact, in guest mode on his headset wearing my own personal Dual Knit Band. The experience leaving my Quest 3 behind and spending extended time in an immersive Apple experience left me both impressed, and conflicted.

Presence Or Floating In Space?

Viewers are given a choice about how to watch an NBA game in headset.

You can watch the game on a floating virtual screen, which already feels cleaner and more cinematic than a traditional TV. Or switch into fully immersive 180-degree 3D view for a full two-hour cut-together view of the game from start to finish. That second option is where the experience shows the most potential, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the first mode. That first mode can be more easily shared in mixed reality with other apps and people, making the experience of watching there a bit like an IMAX version of an NBA game that’s simultaneously without any of the typical distractions. Ian showed me a Jupiter environment in his headset too, and I could’ve watched the game there, surrounded by the gigantic planet and glimmering stars. All that said, instead, I dropped into the immersive mode for most of my time with the game.

In immersive mode, you are limited to a small set of camera perspectives and a singular timeline through the game. There are cameras mounted beneath each basket at opposite ends of the court, a ground-level center-court view, and a wider angle from up in the stands. Those angles are sufficient for following the game. Most intriguing about my time in this mode is that some of the most compelling moments had little to do with the action on the court.

The cutaways to commentators and sideline reporters stood out immediately. Interviews are presented in 3D and human scale, and that changes how you perceive the people on screen. You see their entire bodies rather than a cropped head-and-shoulders shot, and they feel more like they’re standing right there talking to you. The sense of scale is immediate and lasting. You can also tell how tall these players actually are and start noticing details you would never catch on television, like a birthmark on a shoulder or sweat collecting along an arm.

An Apple Immersive NBA broadcast feels intimate in a way traditional broadcasts are not. That intimacy is powerful, but it also highlights a challenge immersive sports production will have to solve. At one moment, feeling present on the court can be a good thing, and the next it can feel uncomfortably close. Immersive broadcasts still need to learn where that line is, and how to stay on the right side of it from moment to moment. In something like the recent Tour De Force MotoGP documentary, the immersive filmmakers had quite a bit more time to prepare around a very specific narrative, and you can feel the difference moment to moment.

MotoGP Tour De Force Places You Trackside With Apple Immersive Blackmagic Cameras
Tour De Force places you trackside at the start of a MotoGP race in Apple Immersive.
UploadVRIan Hamilton

For basketball, the immersive cameras provided terrific close-up views of plenty of interesting things outside the game too. Instead of watching commercials you’re watching the Laker Girls during breaks, and their performances in 3D at human scale again reinforces the difference from television. You feel as if you are standing there, close enough to appreciate movement, spacing, and physicality. During commercial breaks, you can watch the crew wipe down the court, see players and staff milling about, and catch the in-between moments that usually disappear when the feed cuts away. Those behind-the-scenes details add texture and strengthen the feeling that you are actually inside the arena, not just consuming a polished broadcast.

The experience shows more friction once active gameplay ramps up. When using the center-court camera, the action constantly moves left to right and back again. That means repeatedly turning your head to follow the play unless the feed switches to one of the basket cameras. Over time, that motion becomes tiring.

I found myself wishing for more camera options, or better yet, the ability to manually switch views during the replay. An Immersive Highlights clip separate from the full broadcast pulls together some of the best moments seen from Apple‘s cameras over the course of the game, and at less than 10 minutes long, it offers a great way to see some of LeBron James’ best moments from behind the backboard without giving too much time to neck strain. Basketball broadcasts have always been built around wide shots that let you see the entire floor at once. In immersive VR at certain angles, the constant side-to-side motion means your head and neck are doing more work than they ever would in front of a TV or even at the game itself.

Even with the Dual Knit Strap, the Vision Pro is heavy and coming from extended daily use with a Meta Quest 3, I felt the Vision Pro’s weight immediately pushing down on my face, and it stayed there throughout my time. For shorter sessions, it is manageable. For longer viewing, headset weight may be the biggest thing holding this use case back even if it isn’t the only thing.

Immersive Broadcasts And Lighter Headsets

Immersive viewing isn’t just the future of sports, concerts, and entertainment – it’s here today, to quote William Gibson, just “not evenly distributed.” The sense of presence here is too compelling to ignore. What feels less certain is how quickly the hardware evolves, how the technical implementation will improve, and how it will scale to become mainstream.

Ian’s hands-on experiences with Steam Frame would suggest a much more lightweight experience that could be worn for extended periods, and he showed me how slim the Bigscreen Beyond headset is, which takes the minimal small and light form factor to the extreme. He also hasn’t worn the Frame for an extended period, yet, and neither Apple nor the headset manufacturers have shown any indication that Apple’s top tier immersive programming is coming to any headset other than one with an Apple logo shown at startup.

So, much as it was in 2016, and in 2024, right now immersive sports still feel like a glimpse of the future even if it works now. It is not a default viewing mode. What Apple is doing with Vision Pro and Apple Immersive is not a finished product. It is a preview. And as previews go, this one is strong enough to make me want more, even as it makes clear how much work remains to create a mass-market experience.

Walkabout Mini Golf Studio Mighty Coconut Course Corrects With Layoffs, $1 More For Future DLC

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The studio behind Walkabout Mini Golf confirmed layoffs and a course correction to strategy in the wake of Meta’s shifting platform ambitions.

Mighty Coconut joins Cloudhead Games and many others in layoffs, with the studios representing two ends of a spectrum of focused VR development that has been influenced directly or indirectly by the shifting spending and priorities at Facebook and Meta. Cloudhead’s Pistol Whip and Mighty Coconut’s Walkabout Mini Golf remain two of the best ways you can spend your time in a VR headset, but the engines of creativity behind those works keep changing.

Mighty Coconut posted contact information for several former workers to LinkedIn in an attempt to see them recruited elsewhere, and confirmed to UploadVR roughly eight jobs ended in the change with 27 continuing full time.

“We’re feeling the economic pressures of the VR space. It’s an incredibly rewarding place to build games—but it’s also a tough one, especially for studios of our size,” a statement reads. “After a lot of long conversations, trimming expenses, and careful number-crunching, it became clear that reducing our size by about 25% was the only sustainable path forward. As a result, we’re losing some immensely talented people that would be an asset to any studio. “

New DLC courses will be priced $4.99 in virtual reality with the parallel Pocket Edition for iPhones seeing a full pause to development, so no new courses outside VR. Existing paid DLC courses will remain $3.99 in VR.

“We’d like to keep crossplay between VR and mobile functional for as long as we can, but we will also be sunsetting that at some point,” a development update note explained. “We will be sure to announce that in advance once we do.”

When it comes to scheduling, Mighty Coconut is also planning a bigger pause to the release schedule over summer to leave them with one less course in their planned schedule for the year, even as work continues on courses for 2027.

Additional activities in the game like chess and slingshots remain functional but further development is being put into new courses first.

“We feel confident that with these changes, Walkabout Mini Golf will be around for many, many courses to come,” the note reads.

Walkabout Mini Golf was shown at standalone headset demo events powered by operating systems from Google and Valve, but Galaxy XR launched with limited controller availability and Steam Frame is still distributing development kits.